Porsche 911 / 912 coupe headliner bow differences?

[redrobin911]

As far as I've known there are no differeneces in the headliner bows from 64 up to the last of the 993's - makes sense as the roof has never changed however sunroof models are obviously different when it comes to headliners.

So putting a new headliner in my 67S and thought I'd splash out on some new headliner bows rather than use one of the two sets of original 60's ones I had. So when stuggling with the new bows and reading threads on Pelican Parts and other forums knew these were a struggle to fit. Then this afternoon I took one original bows from a 66 911 headliner and noticed it was a different profile to one of the new Porsche ones, fast forward 30mins and I removed all the bows from the old headliners and matched them up with the new Porsche ones and what you see below is the result.

I've arranged the bows in 4 sets of 3, top set is front of the car bottom set is rear of the car. In each set the middle one is the new genuine Porsche part, above is a bow from a 66 911, below from a 65 912. Obviously the ones from the 66 911 and 65 912 are indentical. I'd be astonished if my 60's bows are anything other than original.

Question - why such a difference in orignal and new, could the original ones have distorted over the years or what's going on? Any one else got a theory as to why the new ones are nothing like the original ones????

[chris_seven]

The new bows supplied by Porsche simply don't fit correctly.

This happened about 12 months ago and they suffer from what can be best described as 'Euler Buckling' which distorts the headliner and makes the 'seam' develop a 'wavy' appearance.

You can cut the down but then they need re-shaping.

We have made headliners and Spring tempered 'Stainless Steel' Bows for about 6 years now and have seen this problem quite regularly.