Mike Lake Printed a $750,000 Porsche GT3 RS and Took It to Sydney

Mike Lake wanted a Porsche 992 GT3 RS and refused to wait for a lottery allocation or a secondhand bill north of $750,000 Australian ($535,000). He bought a tired 986 Boxster for about $13,000, drove two thousand kilometers to collect it, and set out to wrap that mid-engine roadster in a full-size printed replica. He calls the result GT3D. Consumer printers, PETG filament, and a garage in Melbourne did the rest.

After taking a huge gamble with a Facebook purchase, files for the corpse appeared. Lake disassembled each panel into tiny components small enough to fit in a couple of machines costing only a few hundred dollars each. When they were counting them previously, they estimated that the entire kit contained 477 parts, 62 kg of plastic, and approximately 2,000 hours of print time. When you come to the end of the build, the data was updated to nearly 1,500 hours and 80 kg of PETG, and that doesn’t include any failure prints or revisions they made later on. One front bumper alone required sixty-one parts, 381 hours of printing time, and more than 10 kg of plastic. Only one fender took 55 hours to complete. The roof was the most difficult single piece of assembly because it came from a convertible donor. It required 41 or 42 printed parts and another 120 hours before it even saw a drop of resin.

So the printed sections were assembled using plastic welding and strengthened slightly. They used pool noodles cut up as interior formers for their early roof work. Lake eventually figured out how add some fiberglass fabric and resin across full panels after confirming the concept with a single quarter panel test, which demonstrated that adding the extra skin provided a lot of extra rigidity for a tiny bit more thickness. The B pillars were strengthened just in case, and the chassis points were braced so the wide printed arches wouldn’t flex all over the place, and moving the radiators out of the way to fit in the larger wheels proved to be a sensible decision once the car left the garage.

Among all the printed parts, there were a few genuine pieces of hardware. There’s a true 992 light bar out back, and the headlights are from a 991.1 because the newer 992 units required a camber system that Lake didn’t have lying around, and then there’s the carbon fiber 992 mirror covers that simply snap onto the printed hybrid housing. The door handles, fuel filling, and the rest of it all remained Boxster parts, inserted into printed surrounds, so the car still opens and closes like the donor. Artka’s custom two-piece forged wheels fill the arches at GT3 RS widths without the need for spacers, and Plastics for Performance windows are 50% lighter than factory glass. The first time they tinted them, the plastic went a little crazy in the sunlight and became all bubbly, but a second film fixed that right away.

Aero received the same treatment, with Ryan from the Fat Lip Collective designing the active DRS wing from scratch. Aluminum rods pass directly through the printed blades, while the electric actuators sit on the stands, seemingly unconcerned, communicating with a Haltech ECU. The first time they hooked it all up, it just worked without any fuss. The profile is completed by the Project Eero front lip and the printed ducktail, and because a proper car has some flare, they added some Sequoia Media stickers and a 3D printed badge that says GT3D rather than GT3 RS.

Under the hood, the Boxster flat-six retains all of its power, albeit with a Turbosmart 5862 turbo, some Legacy Fab piping, a top-mounted Phoenix intercooler, and a set of titanium exhaust tips held on by V-band clamps. There are already videos of the first start-ups, but they need to put it on the dyno to get a real look at the figures. The paint work is a peach Hammer Coatings job over some primed and textured surfaces, followed by some satin black on the doors and under the bonnet, then a lovely clear coat to bring out the color. Six crazy days of assembly got it all done just in time for World Time Attack at Sydney Motorsport Park in September, and when the crowds saw it, they thought it was a proper factory GT3 RS until they got close enough to see all the layer lines they’d managed to hide so well in the bodywork.