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.