Living the Legend

Model 993CARRERA

Year 1995

Acquired SEPTEMBER 2018

Project ‘running gear’ is progressing well. My aim is to bring the running gear up to a decent standard that’s easy to maintain, and not to make the car into a garage queen that I won’t want to use.

With this in mind, I decided I wanted to remove 27 years of dirt to enable me to get Gustavo dirty again. To this end, I had a visit from Tom of @theblastsmith to give the bottom of the car a freshen-up with his dry ice setup. There’s been a lot of talk about this process in recent times and I was intrigued to see what all the fuss was about.

I spent a couple of evenings getting ready for Tom’s arrival: making lots of space around the car, vacuuming my garage carpet and placing green plastic sheeting over all the other stuff. It looked like an operating theatre, or a scene from Dexter! Tom turned up at exactly 8am on Saturday morning, towing his mighty compressor behind his van that contained the dry ice machine. A welcome cup of coffee and a bit of setup, and we were ready to go.

As you know, I have all the suspension components removed from the car including the rear subframe, so access is currently pretty easy. Tom started with a good cleanup of the engine, gearbox and the surrounding bodywork. In terms of the level of dirt present, the car was not nasty, just grubby. The ‘after’ photo (above) of that area is a total transformation – it looks like new!

As I’ve said before, the 993 has always been well looked after, with very little corrosion to any of the running gear. We were starting with a good base, which is key with this process. Ice blasting isn’t like other media-blasting such as sand or glass bead. The aim is to remove materials that have built up on the finished surface, not to remove the finished surface or thick corrosion. Once this fundamental point is understood, you then know what to expect.

In the afternoon Tom was giving my friend Lawrence’s 996 the same treatment. It was interesting to see the difference in the results on a couple of points. When new, the 993’s underbelly is a beige colour with a little overspray of the body colour in some areas. Whereas the 996 underside is the same as the body colour. The 996 was still assembled: the undertrays were removed for the clean, but all the suspension was still in place. The body colour and the contrast of the clean suspension components on the 996 made it all look jewel-like in comparison to the 993, with its beige underbelly devoid of any blingy parts. This almost seemed disappointing, but I know that once I reassemble my refinished parts, it’s going to look great and be easy to keep clean in the future.

If you’d like to hear more about what we thought of the results and what the process entails, allow me to point you to the later section of episode nine of the current series of the 9WERKS Radio podcast. There’s lots