Watch Craftsmen Remake a Classic Porsche Body Panel

It can take a tremendous amount of time and money to restore a classic car. In most cases, car owners have to dig through junkyards and auctions to find the parts they need. But in the case of Porsche, their accessories group has been known to actually recreate parts for classic cars – in this case, using lighter weight materials.

In this short video, go behind the scenes at the Porsche accessories factory as skilled technicians build a replacement lightweight body panel for a 1972 Porsche 911. They start out with a metal production mold, then hand-cut and weld sheet metal around the form. Seams are hand sanded and then the whole piece is polished so it’s ready to be painted and installed.

It takes about 30 hours to create one of these body panels, so I can only imagine it’s quite expensive if you want to replace all of the panels on your classic 911. But the end result is quite worth it – an example 911 Carrera RS 2.7 shaves 19% off of its body weight with these lightweight panels in place, and looks just as good as the day it rolled off the assembly line.