Back in beige

[Darren65]

....if I were to pay to get it done on a freshly rebuilt car I would wait until the suspension had settled with a good few miles under its belt before getting it done......

Totally agree with that; should have waited with my E as it sank quite a bit although Chris only charged a couple of hours to reset things for me.

[Barry]

Have a look here

https://sites.google.com/site/rdmothena ... rschefiles

And it's Ray not Bert

I like that Will be a while before I can use it though ....

Looking forward to seeing how you get on Jamie, if you go for it.

[tim78]

Have a look here

https://sites.google.com/site/rdmothena ... rschefiles

And it's Ray not Bert

I like that Will be a while before I can use it though ....

Looking forward to seeing how you get on Jamie, if you go for it.

Jamie mentioned you had a new car in this thread months ago. I've been wondering what it is and hoping to see one of your restoration threads?

Congratulations Jamie. the car looks great.

[911hillclimber]

Alignment instructions in that link are interesting but assume you can actually find a level flat surface...

[neilbardsley]

Yes, I used a string box method for tracking and a cheap caster gauge.

For corner weight, I simply got the back where it looked right in the arches with my weight (batteries, chunks of steel etc etc) in the driver's seat.

After that, I put the front end on a beam (bit of RSJ) with a pivot (1in round bar) between beam and floor. Then I just tweaked until I had the wheel-arch to tyre clearance I wanted, and the beam was level.

Can't help but be square. Oh yes, I've looked back at all the costs and laid them out below for your consideration.

£0.

It is a fiddle, but frankly it's quite a nice clean(ish) job, and keeps you in control. If you don't like the feel of something, you can tweak it as much as you want. If you've just driven 100 mile round trip, paid £500 or so, and then after a couple of weeks you begin to think it's not to your taste, you've got the hassle of booking it back in etc. DIY if you can afford the time to research and do it. It's much more rewarding.

DIY is James's middle name

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

[jamie]

Bought a nice 5-digit reg for the car so I could fit a license plate surround.

The transfer took less than three minutes online - amazing!

I'll post a shot once it's fitted.

[jamie]

A while ago I decided that I'd like to keep the car looking American. This meant keeping the front repeaters orange (putting the side lights in the headlights instead) and running US plates. Unfortunately there's nothing I could do about the rear lights as the lens colours are all red in the US and it won't go through a UK MOT.

Anyway, a US plate needs a plate surround, otherwise the look isn't right, so I started trawling eBay for suitable candidates. The obvious choice was something from a Californian VW-Porsche surround like Chick Iverson or Vasek Polak, but I don't know literally nothing about the car, or where it came from, and it didn't feel right.

So I started looking at NASA stuff and Boeing stuff and airline stuff, since I like all that kind of thing. Thin pickings on the older stuff, and again - the car probably wasn't owned by an astronaut or a swinging-dick Training Captain for one of the transatlantic carriers, so I ruled that out.

Then I started looking at places and found this one. I don't know if the car has ever been here, but it's not beyond reason. I have, and I loved it so much I still can't quite put it into words. So I bought it. The seller was a museum, somewhere nowhere near California, I presume having a clearout of irrelevant shite.









The registration number I got from Martin P of this parish. I needed five digits or less as it's all that would fit on a 12"-wide US-sized plate. As you can see, it -just- fits on there.

I like that it doesn't really say anything. Apart from Lazy. Or 'read' or 'study' in Danish (according to Google Translate).

[jamie]

-double posted-

[mycar]

You can't get any more American than....

[jjeffries]

I think your car looks titular...newish yet soulful, suggesting all the fun it had in the US when it was still in its (first) prime. The reg number you obtained and its plate work great. You have probably seen the stratospherically nutty prices Vasek Polak plate frames now fetch, ditto Chick whathisname and Otto Zipper versions, all coveted by R-Gruppe types and hangers-on. A secret supply of those, Becker Mexicos and Steve McQueen corduroy blazers would keep us all in beer money. Great job hanging in there with the ups and downs this project presented; it looks like it came out of one of the best restorers' shops. John.

[jamie]

You can't get any more American than....

Ha! Nice.

John - thanks for your kind words. Feels good now I can just jump in it and go for a drive...

[jamie]

In addition to the new plate, earlier today I also re-indexed my rear swingarms.

A week or so back I re-indexed my rear swingarms to 18 degrees. They had been set at 22-ish degrees, but I felt the car sat about an inch too high at the rear. This was before I had driven the car on the road for any proper length of time, so you can probably imagine what happened next...

There's no micro-adjustment on SWB swingarms so you have to pull the whole thing off the torsion bar and rotate it all on the inner and outer splines till the angle is where you want it. It's a pain in the arse, although I've got it down to a fairly swift operation now. It helps that everything is still clean, powdercoated, zinc-plated and copper greased.

If you guessed that the suspension would settle too low, you'd be right - after an evening of driving around, the back end of the car looked like it was melting into the ground.

So today I moved the swing arms back to 22 degrees. I had been worried about the accuracy of my needle-gauge clinometer, so I looked at buying a digital one. Then I remembered it was 2016, and there was probably an app for that. And there was.

So using my phone, I set the left and right sides to 22.2 degrees, which is as close as I could get to 22 degrees. All a bit of a guess anyway, but it helped to know each side was -exactly- the same.

According to Pelican, and perhaps some other places, the 'perfect' 911 (and 912 I supposed) stance is allegedly for the front arch to be 25 inches from the ground, and the rear 24.5. On returning home I was pretty happy to find the rear bang-on 24.5 and the front 1/8th of an inch below the 25 inch mark. I'm OK with 1/8th of an inch forward rake because it lets everyone know that I'm a bad mutha and that I mean business.

I'm not going to get the car corner-weighted - it drives fine. The wheels still need a front and rear alignment but it all generally feels good on the move. I wound the front toe in a bit and the chronic bump-steer as disappeared, which is good.

At least now the car looks good. Time to start shooting some proper photos, I think.

[911hillclimber]

Good stuff, all part of the DIY fun with these cars.
Tracking Fr &Rr can be accurately set using the parallel string method. Setting the rear as always with these cars is awkward, but you have lots of patience!

Look forward to the pictures.

[misteralz]

A while ago I decided that I'd like to keep the car looking American. This meant keeping the front repeaters orange (putting the side lights in the headlights instead) and running US plates. Unfortunately there's nothing I could do about the rear lights as the lens colours are all red in the US and it won't go through a UK MOT.

Unless you fit green bulbs, or smash open a Peugeot 206 rear lamp for its green filter.

[dogbower]

A while ago I decided that I'd like to keep the car looking American. This meant keeping the front repeaters orange (putting the side lights in the headlights instead) and running US plates. Unfortunately there's nothing I could do about the rear lights as the lens colours are all red in the US and it won't go through a UK MOT.

Unless you fit green bulbs, or smash open a Peugeot 206 rear lamp for its green filter.

Or just swop rears at mot time and run US rest of the year.