Welding celebration – Porsche milestone repairs for Phil

[OUR CARS] 2001 Porsche Boxster 2.7

Two milestones; one lost week. My wife’s Boxster tipped over the 200,000-mile threshold recently, more than 150,000 of them added in her 18 years with the car. How to celebrate – memorable road trip, re-watch the original promo video, treat the car to a nice shiny accessory or pro valet? All nice, but with winter approaching, we reckoned dealing with the rust blisters creeping round from inside the wheel-arch lips was more important. Porsches, maybe most cars from this period, seem to retain the rust-free looks of youth remarkably well, but eventually, even the most thoroughly-applied protection starts to fail.

The brown death first appeared at the front edge of the sills where the factory anti-stonechip paint eventually succumbs to gritblasting from the tyres. Plastic wheelarch liners do a fine job of protecting most of the inner and outer front wings, but they don’t stop muck from reaching inside the return lips of the arches. At the rear, the offside wheelarch was perfect but the nearside had some bubbling paint next to where the plastic wind deflector mounts to the rear end of the sill.

Once I’d worked out how to jack up and support the car so the wheels and arch liners could be removed, the job should have been straightforward: bare-metalling then rust treatment, high-zinc priming, anti-stonechip, Arctic Silver, lacquer and lots of Waxoyl. Masking the Porsche seemed to take forever, but worth it to avoid that dodgy-secondhand-car repaint overspray look.

Note the term ‘should have’. While lying on my back exploring the extent of the wheelarch rust, I spotted an area of baggy-looking underbody sealant losing grip on a section of chassis where the front inner wing U-channel overlaps the one stiffening the footwell. Nervous prodding with a screwdriver revealed angry-looking rust beneath, some crusty and flaking. Forget wire brushing and rust treatment, this needed new metal.

Time to dust off my old angle grinding, repair-section forming and welding skills. From at least 15 years ago. The worst section would require a 140 x 80mm repair piece, with a 90-degree bend of just the right radius to follow the original shape. Hard going with 2mm-thick mild steel, and it took a couple of goes to get it right, but the results are neat enough. Mercifully, the rot hadn’t extended to the nearby suspension mount. With a couple of smaller repairs on the same side, and one on the nearside chassis section, my handiwork was ready for some seam sealer along the joins before the usual round of coatings and anti-rust wax.

If that makes it sound smooth and easy, it wasn’t. Spending a week on your back, bombarded with dust, rust, angle grinder sparks and red-hot welding spatter is gruelling. I won’t be taking up a career in car restoration any time soon, but it was hugely satisfying to give the otherwise rust-free Boxster a new lease of life.

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