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Comment by bleuarff | Hacker News Reader

My wife is related to the Panhard family and many of them are collectors of the brand. There are 2 CDs in the family, perfectly restored. That car is indeed magnificent. The main problem is there's only a handful of mechanics who know and can work on such cars (leaving out the absurd money it requires). Replacing pieces can be an industrial endeavor to set up a factory line to craft new copies of the needed pieces.

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It feels somewhat exaggerated. These late Panhard are notorious for their finicky, aluminium-made air-cooled engines, however the parts can mostly be rebuild from scratch using a mill, a lathe and other common workshop tools. My grandfather (a mechanic) used to do that a lot back in the 60s for rare cars such as Bugattis.

The brand was pretty popular at some point, and there are a lot of enthusiasts, even a federation of Panhard fanclubs. When asking a workshop for some part, whether machining or molding or whatever, they generally group their needs to make runs of tens or hundreds of parts to make it viable.

Also I'm not talking about the CD, which is a race car and a different kind of beast, but most of their other models, from the start of the 20th century until the 60s.

> Replacing pieces can be an industrial endeavor to set up a factory line to craft new copies of the needed pieces.

Somehow I'm imagining that manufacturing parts for 60s small-volume car would be comparatively simple, considering that the original manufacturing processes could not have been that complex or specialized either? And I think cars in general were quite a lot simpler back then, especially this sort of light-weight race car would have been very much no frills?

Hah, you'd think so. But the skills required to make some gears are off the charts and CNC machinery doesn't fare all that much better because you first need to figure out what to make exactly. This requires a functional part, or at least one that will allow you do determine the key dimensions.

Bodywork and such is relatively easy, suspension and exhaust parts are doable. But engine parts and drivetrain components can be serious challenges.

>the original manufacturing processes could not have been that complex or specialized either?

this is sort of tangential, but I read that the NASA Saturn V rocket that took the astronauts to the moon could not be recreated today, the "manufacturing process" relied on a small army of skilled welders, machinists, fitters, etc. that just don't exist today. The new rockets being built now need to fit into the currently available industrial base.

For parts, additive manufacturing (3D printing) might be a suitable option? You can even print metal these days.

But what will you print? This is a non-obvious question: you will have to first design the part using nothing but an existing and often failed (sometimes catastrophically so) original. It wasn't rare in those days for every car to be unique.

Of course you need someone to design it. Which is not as difficult as it sounds. But the once-off nature is a hell of a lot easier than "setting up a manufacturing line" as the OP suggested.

Yes that was a bit of an exaggeration. It's not setting up a manufacturing line from scratch, but finding the spec sheets and contracting a workshop willing to do a small run on the desired parts, which is not that easy.

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