Here are some of the alterations made to the original parts in order to fit the new 964-style bumpers.

To offer crash-protection it was important to have more than fibreglass protecting the front and rear of the car, so the original impact bumpers (less all the associated finishing steel and rubber parts) were retained with some alterations to allow the new bumpers to fit neatly over the top. The 964 design uses a similar principle of aluminium bumper behind the fibreglass, but the re-fabrication route saved buying a lot of expensive parts. Safety and strength is important here, not esthetics.

Here you can see the original front aluminium bumper with the indicator unit and rubber insert removed, showing the original size of the cut-out. Followed by the cut-out increased in size to fit around the new light-pods, which are much bigger, as they carry the fog-lights, indicators and reflectors. Finally, the reworked bumper placed round the back of the light-pod in the front fibreglass bumper. New brackets were made to strengthen the top and bottom sections of the aluminium bumper.

Here is the reworked aluminium bumper shown being fitted to the front of the car. New brackets were made-up to fix the bumper to the original impact-ram mounting points. The impact rams could not be retained because they fouled the new fog-light position of the light-pod in the fibreglass bumper. Note that the design of the new brackets allows them to fit above and below where the light-pod lives. The brackets are shown semi-finished, prior to final drilling and bending to shape, to fit the bumper at the right height and depth.

A bracket was made up to support the middle section of the top of the new fibreglass bumper. It had to follow the slightly rounded profile of the front of the car. A piece of punched-angle was cut and shaped to fit. Here too it is shown fitted to the car. The top lip of the new bumper fits over and is bolted to the top of this bracket.

Here are the bumper light-pods with and without lights. The indicators locate in the two slots that I cut and you can see in the photo. Half-moon and filler pieces that join the spot-lights and indicators are not shown here. Indicators and reflectors are the clear type. The camera-flash has caused the orange bulb, inside the indicator, to reflect orange light. They look good all clear.

The exhaust of a 964 exits on the off-side (UK RHD) and a 3.2 Carrera exists on the near-side, so in upgrading to 964-look it's necessary to re-weld the exhaust as in the following sequences of shots. The tail-pipe needs to be ground off and re-welded on the opposite side. the resulting hole is then welded shut with a circular blanking piece of steel.

The exhaust gas normally travels all the way to one end of the muffler and then back to exit on the same end as the inlet, so with the re-weld, the exhaust gas only travels half the distance before it escapes out the new outlet. This makes for a slightly louder exhaust note with a deeper tick-over sound.

Thanks to Arthur (Spud) a fellow Scottish TIPEC member and welder for completing this job for me and giving the exhaust 2 coats of high temperature paint. Spud also weld-repaired the heat-exchangers and saved me another £600.

The exhaust outlet on a 3.2 Carrera has a 60mm diameter and this just isn't enough to fill the exhaust exit molding in the new rear RS bumper. I started to look for a suitable exhaust tip to use and started with standard Porsche tips. Well you can imagine the price of some of these high quality parts. Circa £100 is not uncommon and I couldn't imagine hacking it up to get it to fit, so I took a trip to my local motor-factor's shop and fumbled around in their parts bins. I stumbled across an 80mm gold-anodised aluminium tip with rolled edge.  The shop gave me a discount and it came complete with a set of gold aluminium tyre-valve dust-caps. The price? £6. The totally different and contrasting gold colour works surprisingly well. I love a bargain.

The new rear 964 lights mount slightly differently to the originals, so I made up these short brackets to adapt the position of the mounting screw.

See too the aluminium extension tube and bracket-twist for the lower bumper mountings. These hang on and adapt the original brackets. 

Road-salt takes its toll on some vulnerable components of a 17 year-old 911. Here's an example of one.

The calorific sensor for the heating controller is riveted into a short tube, connected inline between the near-side heat-exchanger and heater control flap-valve.

The tube, as removed from the car - in a very sorry state, followed by the strip of sheet-steel used to fabricate the new one (value, some 20p), and the finished article awaiting painting and fitting...