October 2019 by Bill K.
I owed a friend a favor, so I offered to try and fix the convertible roof on his older Porsche 911 cabriolet. When I got it apart and fixed the alignment problem with the drive cables that caused it to fail in the first place, I was left with a cast aluminum strut piece about the size of a childs forearm that was broken in two pieces. Porsche wouldn't sell just the part, but offered the larger assembly for $1800. None to be found on ebay, because "yeah, they do this". So off to talk to Glen Kirby at Warren Welding. I am a hobby welder, so I know enough to know that this was a long shot. This is a cast piece, that's hard. It's a Porsche part, so it's probably some voodoo Teutonic unobtanium alloy that costs 11ty million dollars a pound just to get a 2% lower weight. And I'm sure they won't tell you what it is. It's a Porsche part, so if it's a little bit wrong, its probably all wrong. And it was basically ripped in two, so who knows what "right" was, and it was a complex set of compound curves. Because designing a straight one would just show weakness (eye roll). Glen looked at it, said he will try, and called me back in two days to pick it up. It was genuinely a beautiful repair, it worked perfectly, and the price was... well... embarrassingly fair for obvious craftsmanship. Highly, highly recommended.
