Back in beige

[neilbardsley]

First submission for 2017 calendar:



Terrific shot, Jamie. One very cool looking motor, also.

Yes please! Jamie you might have a future in taking snaps

Sent from my MotoE2(4G-LTE) using Tapatalk

[jamie]

Thanks guys. I'll keep an eye on it and report back for advice if it regularly goes above 210. Haven't seen it yet, but so far I haven't really caned it either.

Jason - the Avid (Jabiru engine) is long gone. Then I had a Europa, but sold that in Spring. Just the Cri Cri now.

[Bruce M]

As mentioned pages ago, if you want to increase the oil cooling capacity, you could fit a 914 (type4) oil cooler by adding a strip of steel to the oil cooler housing to make space. Neater than an external cooler and no oil lines to deal with.

[dizzycap]

Recent purchases, with numbers:

Two rubber blocks. These hold the gearbox in place. There should be more of them holding the engine in place too, but I'm using a home-designed, laser-cut engine mount with no rubber blocks. I hope it works because these fuckers cost £60 each and there are another five of them on the original engine mount. I'm glad I did this though - they're much more supple than the tough old blocks I removed from the car, so hopefully should do their job better.

A really old post, but what's your impression on having a solid rear mount? Any vibration issues?
I'm in the same situation as you were, and hating the thought of spending 7x£60 for maintaining what I feel is a really poor design. Would like to go 911 front mount, and then something like your solid rear mount. You happy with how your solution came out?

Lovely car, great thread!
//Marcus

[Dingbat]

Hi All
I stand to be corrected but I think the 912 was intended to have 911 type mounts hence the round brackets it the engine bay, I even had an early 912 hand book that showed the 911 mounts fitted, years ago I had a 912 that appeared to have a 911 engine support that was bolted on but was kind of bowed out to bolt it to the 912 end brackets, meaning the back of the motor was rigidly mounted, so I bought some 911 mounts bolted them in and it worked well, the point I am trying to make is that I think standard 911 parts will go in, I think Porsche came up with the kind of heath Robinson set up because late in the day they found the four cylinder motor vibrated more than the 911 six and the 911 mounts transmitted too much of that vibration into the car.

[jamie]

This is what I've been told - the later mount is due to excessive vibration (by German standards) from the four-cylinder motor.

Marcus - I find the 911-style mount just fine, but the engine builder carefully balanced the pistons and conrods in this engine - both individually and each one end-to-end. The engine vibration is negligable (although the clutch / crank / flywheel weren't balanced) and it will idle slow enough that you can count each stroke!

A friend of mine tried a similar mount on a stock 616 motor and decided it was too vibey.

Last weekend I went to see this friend as he was over from the US on a work trip. He owns Wevo (gearshifters, uprated gearbox parts, engine mounts etc) and during the build gave me some nice stuff to try on the car, including a pre-production 901 shifter, which I absolutely love. Besides all this, he is a big 912 fan and has enormous knowledge on these cars, so I wanted to see what he thought of the resto.

He liked the car a lot, but noticed (amongst other things, including that I had left a multimeter in the engine bay) that my engine mount was bent! This is a mount I made myself, so where the top of the mount is flat, I was able, with enormous effort, to bend a 90-degree strengthening lip into it. Where the bottom is angled, it's only really possible to bend a similar lip on either the bottom section of the bits either side, so I left the bottom section without a lip. This is the bit that has bent! The guy that built the engine did say it would be a torquefest, but my god. At present the car still drives, but I need to change my mount to one from Porsche as it looks shite once you notice it.

[dizzycap]

Look at this:


Apparently the pic is from a PET so if anyone has these to hand maybe we could confirm that the brackets that bolt to the engine is the same for all years, and that the early crossbar is in fact a 911 crossbar.

[jamie]

The brackets are the same, but the crossbar is definitely not a 911 crossbar.

It is, however, available from Porsche for fifty quid (which is less than it cost me to make mine).

[dizzycap]

...the crossbar is definitely not a 911 crossbar.
It is, however, available from Porsche for fifty quid (which is less than it cost me to make mine).

I am sensing a solution here. Can't believe these are available from Porsche. Did you note the part number?
//Marcus

[jamie]

Hi Marcus. I do, somewhere. It's also really easy to find on Design 911's parts diagrams.

[jamie]

You must be almost there when you're riveting paint code and conformity plates back onto the door shuts...



Kind of feels like I'm getting close to done now, which is a very dangerous proclamation to put out there. Just working through the snag list and, for the first time ever, the list is getting shorter...

I solved the missing rear-view mirror issue with a 924 mirror from eBay, which arrived on Friday. It was a lot cheaper than the £160 I was looking at to replace it with a part from Porsche, and appears to be identical. Just a shitty plastic mirror. The stalk bit I had managed not to lose, which is useful as it's a 1968-only part. It shouldn't be chromed. Somehow, a while back, I decided I liked the look of the early chromed mirrors and that this onet would look good chromed. I still think it kind of does.





In the same delivery of mail was a new Sync Link throttle linkage kit. I mentioned a few posts back that I took the car to see my friend Hayden last weekend, and that he liked the result, bar a few things. One of them was my smartarse hidden throttle linkage. I didn't want the throttle control complicating the minimalist engine bay, so I concocted a system which was controlled from a pulley on the rear of the right-side carb spindle. This pulley came from a Sync Link kit, which is a cable-actuated throttle system intended for use on VW Type 1 engines. The guy that makes them in the US was kind enough to sell me just the pulley to expermiment with.

In order to actuate the left-side carb, on the front of the spindle was a bellcrank, which fed a thin stainless steel rod across the engine to a crank on the other carb. I spent a lot of time coming up with this system, and I never really liked it as much as I should have, given the effort involved in making it. It also didn't want to idle very predicably.

Hayden's issue with the whole thing was that the spindle through the carb isn't very strong, and where you load up one end with a force, and ask the other end to transfer that force to the other carb, the spindle will twist, meaning the butterflies will not be in line, or worse - it will eventually snap.

So I threw my system in the bin and ordered a full Sync Link kit. It was £200, which is a lot of money for some pulleys, some cables and some milled aluminium.

Of course it didn't fit the 912 either, so I had to make some adjustments to (butcher, with a file) the profile of one of the arms...



And move the cable bracket attachment hole inboard about 15mm:



Here it is installed:



Fitting took a few hours, including fettling the brackets and adapting the the accelerator bellcrank to take a cable clamp fitting. With the solid cross-linkage replaced with a piece of bowden cable, I was also able to simply the previous, rather Heath Robinson, oil pressure sender situation, and move it behind the distributor where it is mostly hidden under the ignition wires.





So far, the system works flawlessly and is worth every penny. I had to add a return spring to sharpen-up the pedal response, but otherwise it worked perfectly out of the box.

I still have the two other pulleys, and it would be very easy to make your own brackets. If anyone is interested in buying the pulleys to put together their own system, drop me a PM.

The car was still not tracked, so I dropped in to see a mechanic friend to get his advice on who could do it locally. A few weeks ago I was certain I would get the car corner-weighted at a proper workshop, but it turned out to be expensive and would require a day of free time. No good to me. He pointed me in the direction of Merityre in Hook, and mentioned that my carbs were popping and banging (they were), so he also leant me his nice Snap-on emissions tester so I could sort it out.

The tracking took an hour and was amazingly cheap. The workshop guys even let me get involved when the front camber adjustment wouldn't go to spec. Unfortunately this car has been around the block, as well as through it forwards, backwards and sideways, so it just wouldn't go. We got it close-as-dammit and called it done. It drives absolutely fine now - arrow straight and balanced-feeling in the corners. I'm pretty sure I'd never feel the benefit of dropping another £600 on a full geometry.



Whilst I was under the car I noticed a could of oil leaks. One is from the remote oil filter lines and should be simple to fix. The other appears to be gear oil and is definitely not an easy fix. Can't make out where exactly it's coming from, so I'm not sure what to do about this right now, other than just keep an eye one it. Interestingly, there are no drips under the car when it is parked-up.







Shortly after leaving the alignment place, my (new) speedo cable snapped. Arses.

At this point I wasn't far from Popham airfield, where I keep my little plane. I decided it was a good place use the emmissions tester to do the tune up, since no-one is going to complain about a Porsche flat four revving away when there are multiple 5.5-litre Lycoming flat fours, on open headers, revving away just across the field. Also, it has bogs and cake. Once I'd worked out how to turn on and calibrate the machine, the tuning adjustments took me about 20 minutes, during which time I discovered that cylinder one had been running leaned right out. Once this was corrected the car idled even better and was no longer spitting and popping. On my friend's recommendation, I went for 3% CO at idle, which gave about 5.5% at 3000rpm.

That evening, my girlfriend was over at her parents' place near Worthing, so I rasn the car down to Winchester and across the coast on the A27. It was noticeably up on power and running like a gigantic, ear-deafening sewing machine. The car really felt quick - definitely a lot quicker than I had imagined it would ever be, and better sounding. The whole hour-long journey, in the beautiful evening sun, was fast, comfy and absolutely brilliant.

The run home this morning was brilliant too, and so was the run back down to Popham this afternoon (this time to fix some stuff on the plane). The journey back was in the dark, with fog and rain, was slightly less brilliant but interesting nontheless. The heater de-mist works a treat and is almost instant from the moment you start the engine.

This was my second fuel stop of the weekend. Shortly after taking this shot, I realised that I had left my fuel cap at the other petrol station earlier in the day. So there's one more thing to add to the list...

[sladey]

Nice write up - glad to see you're finally getting to enjoy the car

[Bootsy]

What Shadey said

[Gary71]

Great to great to hear it's all working at last! Time to enjoy it
Are you bringing it to Spa at the weekend?

[murph2309]

Looks fantastic Jamie - btw, I run all red rear lenses on my car. I just happen to have another set with orange in them that seems to get on to the car at or around the time of MOT. Funny how that happens....