Restoring a 3-bar grille

[Shaun 69 E]

Just finished restoring a 3-bar grille. These were only on late 68 and 69 cars, Porsche had to add in the 2 extra bars for 70 with these things getting wavy just with butterflies landing on the ribs. Long process but really rewarding.

Grille I started with.

[Shaun 69 E]

The bars are held together with solid rivets. I found the best way to separate them was to drill them out from the back.

[Shaun 69 E]

Here you can start to see how bent and wavy these grilles can get. The bars have tabs with little ridges that the ribs press onto and get locked in place. Porsche was very helpful by numbering each of the ribs so you can't mix them up.

To get the ribs off the bars I made a little pry tool to widen the rib slightly on either side of the tabs.



















These "grab marks" were on several of the ribs and were too deep to sand out.

[Shaun 69 E]

Some pics of the bars with the tabs and ridges. Center bar was bent from close to 50 years of pushing down on it to close the decklid.

Black is just paint. Oddly enough the top bar was anodized and then painted. The bottom bar was left bare aluminum, it wasn't anodized.

[tcsracing1]

very nice.

i have two of these grills!

[Shaun 69 E]

Here are the ribs straightened and recurved. I had some male/female tooling made and pound on each rib with a 2lb sledge hammer. It's not for the faint of heart. Even with pounding these out, you can see they still aren't perfect. Part of that is I don't try to make them perfect as these are worked on a lot after being recurved and the law of diminishing returns kicks in.

Then the anodizing is stripped off and they are all sanded by hand on a jig I made to hold them. For days, can be 2-3 days of solid sanding the tops and sides. You have to pay very close attention to and feel the gentle curve of rib's profile which is not symmetric. The "front" of the rib has a different edge than the "back" of the rib. And then they are polished, tops and sides, for a day or two. What I've found is you can get most scars and pits out by sanding but there are some that are too deep and will never come out. And of course you can't locally sand out a scar or pit, the length of the rib must be evenly sanded otherwise you'll have localized low points. A perfect grill is attainable but you may have to add and subtract some ribs.

[sithot]

This is a thankless job for sure. I admire your courage.