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PHOTOS 10
Another PCA club member (Dave Bishop) had recently purchased a
new 2002 996 Twin Turbo and wanted to protect the paint from rock chips, road
debris, bugs etc. and scheduled his car to receive the full treatment from
Alan. Alan accompanied me to the PCA breakfast Saturday morning and
answered questions from members around the table. Afterwards a small
caravan of members followed me to our house where Alan set up shop in
preparation for the 10am start time on Dave's 996. My wife Angela missed
her first breakfast to stay home and bake cookies, and prepare salsa, queso and
spinach artichoke dip to "feed the guys". We arrived to find Dave waiting
for us with a beautiful silver 996TT. I opened the garage so Dave could
pull his car in and Alan could begin the work as other club members began to
show up. Prior to installing the first piece there were some minor rock
chips that had to be touched up with touch-up paint and Langka (see http://www.langka.com/) to provide as perfect
of a surface as possible for the best finished look. Alan also had to
remove the hood emblem to install the piece on the surface of the paint and then
reattach the emblem on top of the Invinca-shield. Dave brought a new
emblem with him that was silver in color as opposed to the standard gold to
better match his silver car. I was the lucky recipient of the gold emblem
which I used to replace my existing hood emblem that had received some damage
from a prior impact.
At one point there were over a dozen members in attendance
observing Alan's craftsmanship and asking questions about the material and the
installation process. As can be seen in the pictures below the material is
pre-cut into pieces to fit the contours of the car. Alan wets the car
surface down with a solution, then peels the film from its backing materials and
lays it on the surface of the car. He then uses a combination of squeegee
and elbow grease to get the material to lay perfectly flat and remove any air
bubbles from in between the film and the paint. Difficult areas may
require the use of a hairdryer to warm the film and allow additional stretching
or the use of an X-acto type knife to trim excess material. One of the
most difficult tasks is to line one piece up next to another and make an even
seam. This can be the difference between professional looking results and
unsightly gaps. Alan will actually lay one piece just over the other and
then use his knife to trim the pieces to form a common single seam, in a similar
fashion to how many wallpaper installers match two pieces of wallpaper.
Watching a knife being used on a 996TT might cause some people to get squeamish,
but Dave didn't seem to have a problem as Alan demonstrated how he scores the
material, not cutting all the way through it and endangering the paint, and then
pulls the material apart the rest of the way to create a safely created perfect
seam.
The total installation time was nearly 8 hours because Dave
purchased all of the optional protection pieces for the sides of the car, the
A-pillars, roofline, etc. A typical front bumper/hood installation like
the one on my Boxster takes around 3-4 hours. During the install the rest
of us watched, asked questions and sat around talking about cars in general
while munching on the spread that Angela made for us. Some members took
turns driving each other's cars and I was happy to provide the keys to my
modified Boxster S for others to test out. After Dave's car was completed
he took some members and my wife out for a test drive and he even let me take
the car out to see if I could splat a few bugs on the new Invinca-shield.
Everyone had a great time, learned a lot about Invinca-shield and got to know
each other a little better. Good food, good people, good times and
Porsche, it doesn't get much better!
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