Did Karman save the tooling for the 914, Like the Brits did? Options

[worn]

I have a Triumph TR6 and my son has an MGB. British Heritage makes all of the body panels (I had to replace about half the sheet metal on my car) and reportedly obtained the dies by tracking them down after the collapse of British Leyland. What happened to the corresponding 914 dies after production ceased?

[wonkipop]

would have been sold off as valuable scrap.
might have been close to worn out too, but given production numbers maybe not.

i read something about nissan having developed a new system for remaking obsolete panels. it was a year or two back. process was in its restoration shop for rebuilding GTRs. they developed a new robot method. i can recall an image of it.
looked like two robot arms either side of the metal panel which painstakingly rolled it or pressed it into the shape. the process was very slow at present. many hours to produce a single panel. but they had been able to remake whole sections of 90s GTRs for restoration purposes. they charge a fortune to have your GTR restored.

nissan were using the restoration shop for prototyping a new industrial technique for mass production - alternative to having to make heavy tool steel industrial dies. its going to have to make panels a lot faster though to be viable. still from small things big things come.

re the mgb body panel dies. i don't think they really left the industrial entity. i think rover group retained all the dies and set up a new small division, called british heritage or something similar, but it was not an outsider company, so it was probably not a matter of tracking them down, as much as thinking of what they could do with them - given the general chaos of the uk industrial scene in the 70s through 80s. they made a small run of modernised mgs with v8s in the 90s as a precursor to the mgf using those dies as the basis for the bodies. i think a couple of them ended up here though i don't think ever officially sold in aus.