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I spent a lot of time looking into this, and spoke to about half a dozen body shops, including two Porsche specialist shops. What I heard was:
- For a racecar, where the exterior appearance is not critical and the interior is gutted anyway, you can weld a series of tabs around the underside of the opening lip and weld the panel to the tabs, then fill with a bit of bondo. Or purchase a plastic sunroof panel and clip it in place (race bodywork suppliers have these).
- For a street car, this is a pretty tough (read expensive) proposition. It is very difficult to weld the panel in place in a way that replicates the non-sunroof roof contours. One shop had done this once (butt-welded) and it was spectacular, but the owner swore he would never do it again (it was his own car, and he was talking about 50+ hours of work, not counting prep or paint). The more typical approach is to cut off and replace the entire roof clip with a non-sunroof clip. Another method is to obtain a non-sunroof skiin and glue it over the existing top and fill/feather the edges.
For a street car, the body work is only the beginning of the expense, however. You will need a complete new headliner kit, with bows, and to install the new headliner, all of the glass needs to be removed from the car.
My conclusion, after looking at the costs involved, was that it was going to be much, much cheaper to find a non-sunroof car.
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