The 'Maverick' Classic Porsche Forum and Classic Porsche Club for Porsche 356, Aircooled Porsche 911, Porsche 912, Porsche 914 & Porsche Replicas. 'We join for the cars but stay for the people'
jamie wrote:When I got the car, the odometer wasn't working....
Funnily enough when I first restored my car I spent hours cleaning up all the dash instruments. On the way to the first MOT the speedo stopped working (which isn't a failure) as the speedo cable snapped.
After very limited mileage and before my second MOT I decided to replace the speedo cable. After several hours of cursing I finally fitted the cable and this fixed the speedo but to my annoyance the odometer didn't increment. So I got to the MOT station with zero miles difference across the year
In the meantime, not wanting to strip the speedo down for a second time I took the easy way out and bought a replacement working one from the States that had the same mileage ( minus a mile ) as my broken one [what a stroke of luck].
So fitted the 'new' speedo and set off for the MOT station this morning, remembering to take the long route as I need to add at least two miles so that the
speedo showed more than last year. All is well and the new speedo works a treat.
So what happens a mile down the road - loud noise from the speedo and its not accruing miles anymore.
So once again at the MOT station, that seems like pretty much the same mileage as last year then, not using the car much then?
So have spent the afternoon with the original speedo fixing the pot metal gear and refitting to the car - which is what I should have done in the first place. Oh and don't ask what happened when I popped the speedo needle off by mistake.
Oh well that's the MOT done for another year.
Keep up the good work Jamie - it's all looking really good.
Regards Andrew
1966 Porsche 912 Slate Grey, red interior - first owner owned for 41 years
1974 Porsche 911 2.7 (The Manhattan project) viewtopic.php?f=28&t=51455
1973 VW 914 1.7 Olympic Blue - ( gone to a good home )
Went to the Isle of Man for the Manx Classic this week. Good fun. Did a bit of work whilst I was there, and got to ride a friend's 1998 R1 around the TT course on Saturday morning. Normally I come away from experiences like that thinking 'I want a...', but I didn't want an R1 - it was nice to try it, to tick an item off the bucket-list, and to hand it back afterwards.
I'm not a fast rider, so I bimbled along at 50-80 through the lanes, passing stern-faced policemen stood next to bikes. They don't check your speed - they're there to remind you that you're on an open public road and will come after anyone who is riding dangerously. Unfortunately, by the time I got to the famous (derestricted) Mountain Road, it was closed due to a head-on involving two bikes.
I rode the coast road through Laxey and back to Douglas, then turned up back up the other end of the mountain to have go on the bit that was still open. The traffic was light due to the road closure, and I was able to squirt the bike up to 130mph for a brief section of straight, tucking down behind the screen for a taste of what it must be like to race here. Warp-drive blur - the road is narrow, and not very straight at that speed. On the way back down the hill, heading towards Creg-Ny-Baa in the correct direction of the TT course, I had another go, wheelying slightly over a crest in the road like you see proper watermelon-balled TT riders do. My saints! The road racers do a 130mph average speed across the whole course. 130mph average for f***'s sake. I've watched TT racing on the island once before, but it never stops being amazing. Simply seeing it is one of the most extreme things I think you can ever experience.
Here's a vid from Friday evening of some of these guys going through the bottom of Barregarrow during practice for next week's Manx GP: https://vine.co/v/eIaU2U9uY1J
I flew home on Saturday, leaving quite lovely VFR conditions on the island and travelling gradually into the same claggy shite that had sat over southern England the whole of last week. I bottled it and landed only nine minutes from my home airfield, on a glider site just south of Swindon, in horrible low cloud - the sort of conditions that kill billy-bunter VFR pilots like me. I shouldn't have been in it. A friend came to pick me up and I stayed at his house last night. Today the weather was still balls, so I went to a hangar at Thruxton and helped work on an aeroplane he is currently building - block-sanding the fibreglass engine cowlings, because it's been a few months since I was doing this on the 912 and I've started to miss the smell of filler dust.
I was (just) able to fly home this evening. Another friend dropped me back to my stranded aircraft in his RV7, and managed to smash the tips off his variable-pitch Hartzell prop (I think about £8k for one of those, plus whatever damage to the motor if the crank is bent) on the way out of the site. Ugh.
A mad couple of days, and an utterly shite end to the weekend.
In more positive news, I've had some pictures back from the painter and the car looks utterly amazing. It should be ready and home pretty soon.
That second TT clip scares the life out of me. I know nothing about riding a motorbike, but the amount of throttle he's giving it through the corners is mind blowing. And the physical battering they take and that's before you even consider the reaction time needed to make inputs / adjustments doing 200mph getting thrown off balance. It looks like it is actually impossible to me. Love the TT.
...in other news, looking forward to seeing the finished car. One hell of a ride this thread
jamie wrote:
In more positive news, I've had some pictures back from the painter and the car looks utterly amazing. It should be ready and home pretty soon.
great stuff! Love this thread.
Any update on the "dudes" engine work ? Really interested in what he has been doing.
The engine is finished and ready to install, and The Dude is now occupied building engines (nicer things than mine - I think Maserati, Ferrari and Aston stuff) as a full time business. As such, his desire to remain anonymous appears to have somewhat waned. If anyone is looking for beautiful engine work, drop me a PM and I'll pass his details on.
I had, till this point, been keeping the identity of the painter anonymous. I'll explain why...
Back before I had even laid a coat of primer on the shell, I got in touch with a DDK member who owns a van hire company and a body shop. The shop's usual line of work is obviously commercial vehicle repairs, but one of their painters was capable of mind-bendingly beautiful work and had painted four DDK cars in the past. I liked what I saw, and contacted him to discuss.
Even if I've thus far proven that I can't paint a car, I do know how paint is supposed to look, since I have to photograph it on cars every day. What I didn't know back then, was that a decent job has 200+ hours of preparation work in it before the paint is even applied. Multiply that by 50 or 60 quid, or whatever your bodyshop's hourly rate may be, and suddenly that's a five-digit number. Perhaps not a big deal on an old 911, but very big on a lowly 912. Whilst I was happy to spend money in the right places, I had a satin silver finish in my mind and this was achievable without 200 hours of prep work - having no reflection, the satin would have hidden any wobbles in the panels, and the bodywork would look fine.
Still, I couldn't let the car go together without doing it the justice that it deserved. Barry had got the shell remarkably straight and gapped to perfection, but I knew the hood and roof were beaten to shite and it was beyond my budget to have them corrected further. In this case 'near enough, I'll finish with filler' had to do. So I started reading internet articles and watching YouTube videos on how to prep a shell for paint. I spoke to lots of people I knew, too, since I knew lots of people who did this for a living. After a while, I had the process nailed-down in my head, so I bought the materials I needed and got to work. On the basis that I would be saving a lot of money by doing it myself, I bought the best quality materials I could, which made the work a lot easier and definitely took up some of the slack in my mistakes.
I wanted the car to be a very distinct, highly reflective satin silver. I made myself ill with lack of sleep from late-night trawling in search of a product that would give me this look. The one I settled on looked amazing, but once applied (to the whole F****** shell, idiot) it just didn't stick well and was a total waste of time and energy. I eventually worked out another way of achieving the look I wanted, which was to paint the car in traditional 2k urethane first, then apply a temporary 'liquid wrap' of satin silver PlastiDip once the car was finished. With the satin silver top coat now off the cards, I visited the paint shop belonging to the DDKer with the van hire business, and spoke to the painter that had completed those four beautiful aforementioned cars. He talked me through how to apply 2k, and gave me a big wad of fibreglass filter to use in a homemade spray booth. I went home, thought about which colour to paint it, tried and failed to let someone else decided which colour to paint it, then (on the grounds of safety, and because Sand Beige had totally lost its zing now the car had been transplanted out of the golden California desertscape into the wet green-and-grey of the UK) opted for the lairiest shade available in 1968 - Bahama Yellow. I made the garage into a spray booth, and painted the car.
The job had a few runs here and there, but the application was smooth and even. I was happy. I started to colour-sand the car and ended up burning through a few panel edges. No worries - I can touch those up...
Well, I couldn't - the touch-ups showed as halos of different-coloured paint. Another waste of time and energy. I considered sending it to a local paint shop to be finished, but I felt uneasy about giving up on it so near the end. After much deliberation and upset, I flatted-down the car, and with the help of a friend, reconstructed the garage spray booth and painted the car again. This time the application was better, but I sanded through the edges again almost straight away. After many misery-filled updates to this thread, the DDKer with the paint shop suggested I send the car over to him.
Professional painters don't much like working over someone else's job - there's the risk of a reaction between different paint products, or the prep work simply not being good enough and the car looking like a wavy mess. As most car bores know, a good paint job isn't as much about the top coat of paint as it is the hours of work underneath. The paint gives the shine, the prep gives the reflection that flows along the length of the vehicle as smooth and straight as smoke trails in a windtunnel (similarly, the prep bit requires little skill and loads of time, and the application of paint is all about the skill, and not much about time).
Not having seen the car in the flesh, the DDKer's offer to make things right stood on the proviso that I would not to mention to anyone that his bodyshop was doing the last coat of paint, lest the rumour mill decree that they had done a crappy job of the whole thing. I likened it to when one of my photos goes through a shite retoucher and ends-up as a dog's dinner with my name next to it. I promised that nothing would be said.
I had the car dropped over to the bodyshop in the second-to-last week of August and within a couple of days had photos arriving on my phone. First the car masked-up, then the paint going on, then more shots of the paint looking very much like liquid and pinging colour in a way that it didn't on my attempts at it. At the end of last week, it was sounding like the car was almost done. The DDKer said his paint guy was very happy with the prep I had done, and that there was no longer any need to maintain an oath of silence. This was, quite simply, the ultimate compliment.
So thank you very much for this Darren and Rich - I couldn't have wished for a better outcome.
