This episode may feel stretched out in time. That happens: sometimes the work goes deep, sometimes it goes wide. Today it goes wide, several fronts at once.

Last time I was thinking about raising the height of the front bumper. That's done. But the integrity of a bumper like this stays in question. The plastic itself is strong enough, yet its joints are always the weakest place in a car, all the more so under swings of temperature. I know this well from the Mustang, which is waiting its turn for molds and everything else. The problems there are the same.

The fix is simple. Wrap the whole front bumper in fiberglass. And while we are at it, sort out the headlight, which after the old impact would not seat where it should, and for the longest time I could not tell why.

We took the bumper apart with Felix, and we saw. The left side is full of the plastic pieces that hold both the bumper and the light. On the right they are simply gone, vanished somewhere. And here it helps that a second Porsche sits in the back yard, the lilac one, waiting on a full redesign that is essentially finished and only needs starting.

We went to it, pulled the supports we needed, and moved them onto the silver car. Half the job done.

Then a little fabrication. Fiberglass will add weight to the assembly, so it needs extra reinforcements, and we decided to weld them straight onto the base metal. That way the whole thing holds tighter. After some time with the welder we put the bumper back, and at last it sat the way it should.

Now the resin. We mixed two liters, rolled out the fiberglass, and cut it into pieces that follow the form of the bumper. This strengthens it too: the front end had been hit, and though we ran it through plastic weld, extra reinforcement never hurts. We left it overnight, and by morning it had set.

One important thing. Resin eats paint, and paint is better stripped ahead of time. The compound heats the layer beneath it so much that the paint shrivels into an accordion and the whole thing lets go. It happened on a fender once, and we learned it the hard way.

By morning the picture came together. What is left is cleaning, trimming, filling, and running the lines out, but that is finishing now, not foundation. The front end is essentially resolved.

Then we went to the rear and cut a line into the metal for the future OLED light bar.

That did not take long, and the prototype we will cast from silicone and rubber, so there is still work waiting there. But today it is mostly the front.

When the filler had dried, we took the sanding bar, a pneumatic plane twenty inches long. It runs out the long lines that small blocks cannot reach. It has its drawbacks, but the main lines it holds, and that is what we did.

The next day we looked again. Many read the form under black powder, a good trick, but when the filler is piled up in different colors, everything turns into a zebra. To avoid that, we sometimes lay a thin coat of ordinary filling primer. It gets covered over later anyway, but the form comes up in one color, and the small things surface at once. You clean them off and see the form anew. There may be more efficient ways, but from experience this helps us a great deal, especially over a mix of fiberglass, glass filler, and ordinary filler.

We ran the primer and saw all the low spots. Here black powder does the job well, everything shows, everything comes to the surface. We cleaned the surfaces down, found the deep hollows, filled them, and went over it once more.

While we were at it, we cut the mounts for the side markers. On the front bumper they belong, because there is too much open space. Porsche forms are very fluid, and without them the front is left with a huge empty, amorphous patch. The side lights give it a line and a direction. So they need to be there.

At that we stopped and took a couple of photos. Happy Fourth of July, everyone, and a good holiday to all.