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.