Aluminium Badges

Building an early replica has been a bit of a challenge in some areas. The Late 50's cars have a pretty good availability for trim and parts as most parts are now remanufactured. The early cars however have a number of differences from those late parts which means that in many cases, to be correct the late parts cannot be used. One such case is the Porsche scripts.

On the early cars these were made from aluminium. Unfortunately with so few surviving early cars the early style aluminium badges do not come up for sale very often and when they do they command Porsche money. So, in a bid to be more authentic I had some scripts water jet cut from aluminium. I drafted them up in CAD and my friendly local water jet cutter cut them from 3mm aluminium. These now need to have the recesses and burnished finish added by hand which will be a bit of a tricky job given how fragile they are. I can now see the truth of the statement that the Porsche badges are made by a jeweller.

This is almost all of the external trim that I need, I just have to finish making the mirror housing and I will have everything.

Here's a closeup of a regular badge for comparison. As you can see the bar that links the letters is slightly lower than the letters themselves. It also has this burnished effect, this would have originally been made in the die by the diemaker but I can add a similar effect using a small punch. Notice also how the letters are ever so slightly rounded off, likely from the polishing process.