Ending the Year 2010

Well, the month, and the year, ended well with good progress. Now that all new pans are welded in, it's time to concentrate on all the small stuff.... and there is a lot of small stuff. The body is covered will small rust and structural defects that need to be addressed. After 45 years on the road, just about every corner of the car needed attention. 

Here we see the rear passenger side frame rails. Sometime in the past the car suffered some pretty good trauma here. You can see that the frame rail has been punctured! This allowed water to penetrate the frame rail, and caused quite a bit of rust on the lower side, and rockers. 

After cleaning the area, it's readied to be cut.

Frame rail cut open.

Replacement section is fabricated.

Here the section is tack welded in place. 

After finishing up all the welds, the section is ground down, and ready to be undercoated.

It seems that rust really likes to live around the wheel wells. Plenty of water spray, and rocks to chip the paint. Here is the lower section, just rear of the front wheel on the passenger side.

Section cut out.

New piece is fabricated, and ready to be welded in.

And on and on it goes like this. Several other sections had this 'spot' treatment, but I didn't really stop to take pictures along the way. This is the part of the restoration that I just want to get done. I'm counting the days until it's paint ready.... and that's not soon enough.

Here's how I spent most of my free evenings in December. 

The underside of the pans and rocker panels were pretty bad. Looks like the previous owner maybe landed on a curb, or something of that nature. There is also extensive damage done from jacks and hydraulic lifts over the years that it was serviced. I'm going to fashion steel plates that act as lift points once the bottom is finished. More on that later.

Here we can see down the rail of the rocker, and it's pretty bad. Time to pull the seam out.

I didn't have the "proper" tool, so I welded a bolt from my vise grips to the slide hammer. This worked amazingly well to pull out the seams where the stud welder wasn't strong enough. 

Here's a picture of the seam, all pulled out and straight again. It took quite a few studs with the puller to get the pan out.

Since the internal combustion engine had so many fluids, the body had a lot of drain holes. Especially in the front section where the old gas tank was. Since this car will no longer house a gas tank, I took the extra time to weld shut all the drain holes, and grind them smooth. This will prevent areas where water can enter in the future and cause rust problems. 

Now it's a hole, now it's not.

Well, so that's how the project ended the year. Upside down on the rotisserie, getting all sorts of small sections all over the car, cut, and replaced. I started calling it The Quilt the other night. It just seemed so appropriate for all the patch work going on.

Happy New Years everyone.

Mid Dec. - Successes and Victories

Well, hard work does pay off. The LeMons race team took a first place at Buttonwillow out of 173 cars. Toughest field yet, and a close finish with only a 39 second lead over the second place team. Very close for 16+ hours of racing. Now with the race behind us, and the great feeling of a victory, it's time to focus on the 912 again. Our next race isn't until March 2011 at Sears Point, so there is a couple of months available to power out tasks on the car.

Rust, rust everywhere. Time to do something about it.

I found a rear C-pillar clip online up in Sacramento so I drew up some lines of the cut for the junkyard sending me the clip. This is a project for a later date. For now, pans...

First of the pans to be replaced. Time to cut, trim, weld, and grind.

Here's the pan cut out, serving as a template for the replacement.

Ready for the new pan to be placed.

Unfortunately, the rust ate into the interior rocker rail. This will complicate the repair a little.

Here you can see into the interior rocker panel that needs to be replaced.

First pan, trimmed and tacked in. The welding is a slow process due to heat distortion. Great care must be taken not to weld longer than a 1/4" or so at a time to keep the heat and metal distortion at a minimum.

Here's the four pans, welded in, waiting to be ground down. Since this has to be done from both sides of the car, it's time to build a rotisserie to make the job much easier.

While working up simple plans for the rotisserie, I took on smaller tasks. The one below is to repair a speaker wire hole that was drilled in a very bad spot in the door jamb (right above the VIN tag). This needs to be filled and moved to the inside. While I was at it, I filled the VIN tag rivet holes, so that a fresh new one can be installed after paint. Removing the VIN revealed that it has been removed before.

Here's the passenger side after being filled and ground.

Driver side, after filling the holes.

Here's the ghetto rotisserie that J from Big Fish Motorsports and I built. It was made from some scrap metal and casters the neighbor gave us... and a little bit of some new metal.

This is going to make the underside work much, much easier. (hence, faster!)

Now with the car on a rotisserie with all the suspension removed, it's time to start rebuilding the components. Here is the front end removed as one piece. Such a clean simple design that really hasn't changed much over the years, with the exception of coil-overs on newer 911's.

Here's the front end all disassembled and ready for rebuilding. I looked into replacing some of the parts with later model aluminum parts, but the mods to make it work/fit were too extensive just to save a few pounds, so the setup will stay in it's mostly original steel configuration. 

Early Dec. - Staying On Track, and Racing Diversions...

The updates have been slow, but this is a good thing. The race team that I belong to has our final race of the year at Buttonwillow, so I took some time off for a track day, and numerous evenings prepping our race car for the race on the first weekend of Dec. We've added Bill Caswell to the team as our 4th driver, and we are in the running to be in the national standings if we do well. To keep momentum on the 912, I did a bunch of small jobs that included getting the brakes off to be rebuilt and I started to rebuild the pedal assembly.

Here's the brake assembly, pistons rusted in place.

Some pics of the pedal assembly, ready to be rebuilt.

Here is the culprit of all this rust. Natural fiber insulation. It's like driving around with wet towels in your car for 44 year. I think once it gets wet, it never dries. So yeah, this stuff was soaked when I pulled it out.

Here's our team, POS Racing, getting ready for the 24 Hours of LeMons, Buttonwillow.

Late Nov. - Bare Naked Lady

Well, finally got her all stripped down and ready to start cutting out the rust and replacing the affected panels. I can't say that I've ever taken on a project with so much rust before, but the same rules apply. The only way to get rid of rust, is to cut it out. There aren't any short cuts or magic bullets when it comes to rust. It's like a cancer that won't quit. At this point I'm just trying to make progress in any way that I can. There are so many things to do, that I find myself popping around from task to task as opposed as trying to take a particular task all the way to completion. For example, I'll start to take the tar insulation off and down to bare metal, but after an hour or so with the scraper, it's time to move on to something else, finished or not.

One thing that has been driving me crazy is the amount of grease and engine oil left over. The undersides of all the rear body panels are coated in 44 years of oil and grime. Because of this, I finally decided to load it up on the trailer and give her a proper pressure washing. Although a generous amount of the grime ended up on my face.

Here's a pic of the grime. It's 1/8-1/4" thick all over the underside. What is it about horizontally opposed engines that make them leak so bad?

Grime face, post pressure washing. The car, not the face.

And here's how she ended Nov.

Mid Nov. - Stripping Her Down, Assessing the Damage

Had a productive evening last night by getting the car stripped down enough to take a good look at what I have, and the extent of the rust damage. Initially I was thinking that I really got a pretty bad chassis, and it would be too much work to bring it back, but the shop got a visit from the Bill Caswell team last night (more on that a little later) who needed to put the finishing touches on his Baja 1000 BMW e30 for the race this weekend. Bill's good friend Cameron, who does Porsche restorations in Chicago, was here and looked over the chassis giving it his stamp of approval, which made me feel pretty good about the project. Cameron is the man behind some recent tribute cars, including this Porsche Paris Dakar tribute car, and an uber-rare RUF Slant Nose 935 he restored. Too bad Cameron lives in Chicago because he is a Wikipedia of Porsche knowledge, and I know I could learn a lot from him.

One thing has become pretty clear early on. This has turned into a huge project quickly. Going from what would be a quick paint job and electric motor swap just turned into a ground up total restoration of a 912. I'm only hoping that I can stay on track and be zipping around in less than a year. I know just a restoration alone can take that long, so I really have to stay on track and not get too caught up in the process. I'm finding this tough as the car is so easily loved that cutting corners might not be wise.

Here's some pics of the progress. Interior, and most exterior parts have been stripped. Time to start sourcing the panels that I'll need to replace, and practice some welding on thin, aged, sheet metal.

The good news is that the front end is in really good shape, and has never been in an accident. It's really too bad that a car can avoid accident damage for 45 years, but is a victim of it's own doing by being covered in water soaked sound insulation for decades. Rust never sleeps. The doors, hinges, and alignment of them, including hood and trunk, are all real nice, so more good news there.

Bill's team needed a trailer to take the Baja e30 to Mexico, and since you can't rent one and take it across the border, we lent him ours from our POSRacing LeMons Team. This leaves us without a trailer for our track day at Buttonwillow this weekend, so now we have to rent one. Oh well, we just want to see Bill's e30 do well in Baja.

Here's some pics of the Baja e30 as the finishing touches were being put on it.

That's Sam Smith of Jalopnik fame in the last pic. He's going with Bill to Baja and has a Twitter feed that he'll be posting updates of Caswell's Baja status. There will also be a lot of stuff on Bill's $500 Craigslist Rally Car Facebook Page.

Alright, time to go source some panels.

Day 1 - Bringing Eva Home

Howdy all, and welcome to my project blog that will follow my little journey that should take me about a year. I'm embarking on a long project to fully restore a classic Porsche, and outfit it with an all electric drive system. I will try to stay current with this blog and post at least a weekly update. Part of me thinks I'm just doing this to remind me how far a person will go, just for the love of a car (I think I've been here before). In this case, something classic embraces the future, and in the process I hope to save a piece of history that otherwise might surrender to the mighty red worm (aka: rust).

OK, so on 11/15/2010 I brought home my new little girl, a 1966 Porsche 912. I say little because the 1965-67 912's have a much shorter wheel base (called a SWB Porsche) than the newer 911-12's, and have a real compact look. I've named her Eva, for 2 reasons. One, she will be an EV, and two, Wall-e is a pretty darn good waste of 2 hours. (and oddly enough, Wall-e's Eva looks like a 912) She has a lot more rust than I have time for, but it seems like every early Porsche has this problem due to the huge oversight of not galvanizing all of the body panels until 1976. Right now she's Bahama Yellow, but this will change to the Porsche Silver Metallic. This color was available as special order in 1966, but not as a stock option, so it's like we're going back in time to give her a 'special order' paint job.

I'm a little bummed that I have to spend the next couple of months working just to get a good rolling chassis, but then again I'm so picky I doubt I could go out and find exactly what I wanted. Either way, I'm excited to get this project 'rolling'.

So here she is, fresh off the trailer:

And here is a picture of my "goal" car:

Something for me to aspire too. Anyway, enough blogging for me, and time to get to work.