2.4E From IKEA to Blut Orange

[MT]

Regular viewers (and people who know me personally) will know of my Northern tight-fisted roots. This does not mean that I am unwilling to part with significant sums for what I (not always rationally, I'll concede) I regard as 'good value' - I reference the £1500 splashed on the OE inner wing for example. That said I do baulk at some of the prices charged by Porsche (and some suppliers) for relatively simple parts. I reference the circa £9 each for the accelerator rod bushings through the centre tunnel (902.423.227.00 - 3 required) ... especially as on all the cars (5 to date) I've dismantled there has only been 2 undamaged. So a bit of research and a visit to Davis Plastics in Crawley on a trip to the platers and for £2.06 you can have 60cm of 18mm dia white Acetal plastic rod. 20min on the lathe and Bob's your Auntie. Enough for my car and Garry's 912, and enough left for quite a few more. My assistant is confident that his 'hot-wire' technique will form the required longitudinal cut to finish the job off nicely.



Flushed with success I moved on to the NLA 'angled pipe' (911.501.539.00) that go through the RH rear inner wing to link with the oil tank. Take a metre of 25mm mild steel pipe (£5) and cut in two, then get my local Hydraquip to compress an olive on two ends. (£4) Cut and weld



Cut out the old ones. I cut them flush on the outside and then used a conical hole cutter to drill through, neaten the hole and release the 30mm or so on the inside.



Weld and paint in POR15, ready for some seam sealer around both sides of the joints tomorrow



Then more mundanely, I finished welding in the RH lower screen repair. I will test fit the screen to ensure the profile is right (don't trust the pattern part) before finally welding it to the dash top. Then just the A pillar to repair and that should be another section done. Hopefully I can get an assistant over the Xmas hols to help remove the roll cage and fit the new rear wing.

[haasad]

Brilliant, these well engineered DIY solutions are the way forward...

[911hillclimber]

X 2 to the above comment from the Master!
Great thread.
I well remember this car from Bob's early days just before he went 'GT'

I seem to recall he said the racing in the Giro series was not very Gentlemenly...

[MT]

Happy New Year to all.

Had very relaxing, boozy and food-filled 'holiday' with all members of the immediate family present (and with presents!). Several argumentative and hilarious family games of 'Articulate' (we clearly aren't after some wine and beer), then off up the shed for some peace and quiet.

Although my ingenious method of back-dating the outer sills worked very well on the Doctors car, I did in the interim meet with a fine fellow called Jez (or similar) at Carrera Performance in Horsham, who suggested an easier and equally effective solution that he has used on many restorations ........ read on and judge for yourself.

Cut out some sheet steel the approx size of the recesses in the outer sill. Bend one end over per the photo and cut so they lie nice and neatly in the recess just below the outer edges




Using JB Weld or similar fix into the recess (I had by this time welded the outer sill in place as you can see, and also welded some sheet metal 'pennies' into the two larger holes in the sill)



A skim of filler, and you're done. Much easier, and you can do it after fitting the sill and without the 'fettling' abuse that my earlier method requires. Less critical also on the LWB as much more of the sill is covered by the chrome strip.



In the meantime the rear wing had to be fitted. This proved an very interesting exercise. Basic problem was that with the front wing forming a near perfect gap and profile with the door and the bonnet, and with the rear wing properly located to fit beautifully with the profile and trailing edge of the engine lid, the door 'gap' to the B post edge of the rear wing wasn't ...... a gap that is .... snug would be what it was.



Anyway after as much jiggling and fettling as I thought prudent I went ahead and attached the rear wing. Weld, grind and fill the C post joint. As you can see the dust from sanding off the filler does get everywhere!



Bit of primer to hold off any rust (and in the current uber-damp conditions that doesn't take very long at all)



Then out with one of Santa's presents from the e-bay elves



Always thought this would be useful, but they are so very expensive, especially if you start collecting all the various attachments needed for the less straight-forward (but more common) joints. Anyway this one came with a full set of attachments, and wasn't tooooooo pricey. Well not unless you factor in the £250 I had to spend to run 6mm armoured cable up to my shed, and upgrade the CB's..... but I needed to do it for the big compressor Santa brought as well, didn't I my love. Anyway it works beautifully ... now.



... and along the engine lid joint as well. After a bit of contemplation and consultation I had decided the best solution to the door non-gap was a technique I had seen Charlie at my local bodyshop deploy. Basically if you just need 3-4mm (as I do) and the door striker/lock line-up will allow (it does) then grind off the door edge in 3-4" sections to the required profile, clamp the door skin (it will come loose) and tack weld every 15mm or so along the edge. Doing it in sections means the door skin doesn't start moving or getting too slack. Grind the welds back to the desired profile (penetration of the weld will ensure the skin stays held in place) and repeat along the edge.

I run a tape along at roughly the required profile to give me a guide



Still needs to be tidied up, but you get the idea. This wasn't the original door so I suppose some adjustment was inevitable. I have heard and seen of people 'leading' up the edge or the B post to close a gap, but have not seen any thread where the gap was too small and my searches on here and Early911S Registry didn't yield anything either. I'm happy with the solution and I think with a bit more tidying up it will be good. Not sure what's going on in the middle section of this photo because apart from skimming back to bare metal the rear wing is untouched and the gap is nice and even all the way along its length. Must have been the crappy photographer.

[MT]

... and after a bit of tidying up .... Happy with the result as this was the first time I've attempted this technique.



So that's one side done.
Hope the other side is a better fit.....the outer sill to door fit looks good but I haven't tried the front or rear wings yet. Off to visit another south coast DDKer tomorrow as a bit of a busman's holiday. Oh and the roll cage is out, and on its way to a new DDK home...... and a few bob in the DKK charity box.

[shoestring7]

How do you like your coffee Mick?

C>

[MT]

White, no sugar. See you about 9:30 to 10am Charles.

Have the door pin patent slide hammer and the engine lid template in the car....

[MT]

Quick update. In summary:

Repair all that horrible rot down the LH B post



LHS door/outer sill/kidney bowl on



Rear wing on same as RHS, but this time there was a good gap to the rear of the door, and the profile only needed a very small tweak at the top and where the wing and outer sill overlap.



You can see just how dusty it gets when sanding the filler. That said if you have to wear a mask then this is the weather for it....... not too hot and sweaty in there! Test the front wing and that's the RHS done. I really had very little filling, and hence sanding to do, but the entire workshop is now covered in a not-so-thin layer of dust.





So today with the help of E-type Steve we 'de-jigged' .......back to the rotisserie, over she goes and it's now on with tidying up the roll cage damage, replacing one of the cross-member mounts, seam-sealing and coating.




Also as I know the front mounts are all true and correct from the jig I plan to make up a simple small jig for the front suspension, similar to the Porsche gauges P 863 and 863a (page 30.1 - 1/5, Section 8 of the Workshop manual). I have at least one more car to do a front suspension pan replacement on for a friend and this will save it needing to go on a Celette, or all the measuring and anguish that went with the Doctors car replacement without any jig of any kind. More on this as it gets actioned!

With luck should be ready for paint in a week or so.....

[stretch]

[johnM]

Looking great Mike. All this metal work is all a black art to me.

Keep up the great work.

Kind regards.

[MT]

Looking great Mike. All this metal work is all a black art to me.

Thanks John. Not what you meant, but I have to say black etch primer is not a good idea - makes seeing where you've been on a dull day in a shed when painting black POR-15 trickier than it need be!

Anyway we are now just about ready for the next big milestone - PAINT!

The steps to get to this milestone were not insignificant. Have you hotrod/race boys any idea of the havoc some body shops create when fitting your beloved roll cages???
After lots of careful cutting and grinding off the 3mm plate (two layers) welded to the inner box frames, you then find this hacking mess where the holes were created for the captive nuts



So more cutting, shaping, welding and grinding - more complicated for these as the box section is made out of a much thicker steel grade




Not easy to make it neat after all the distortion when the cage was installed on top of mine to get it out...... but a coat of POR 15 covers many sins. Sorry for the crap photos, but the combination of flash, shiny paint, dingy shed and crap photographer makes for a poor combination



Anyway they'll be under soundproofing and carpets so no problem. Then on to the roof. Two issues. First the compartment in the roof where the sunroof slides into was in surprisingly good order apart from one corner



So cut out the rotten bit, and make up a repair section, including the captive bolt for the roof cable mechanism



.... and weld in place.



While the rubber tube was off (welding melted it - unsurprisingly) I checked the drain tube was clear ....... and it wasn't. No problem, out with the third most useful non-conventional item in any any toolkit after duct tape and an old, blunt screwdriver ...... a metal coat hanger (as an aside what are we going to do when they stop making these??? I have already noticed an alarming trend to thick plastic ones). They don't like it up 'em ...... certainly in this case it didn't. Hit a very solid blockage up near the end you can see in the pic near the rear screen top corner. tried going at it from both ends with drill bits, pointy things etc etc. In the end I found a long bit of 4mm rod that would just go up the tube from the bottom and gave it what my lead driller in the GOM used to call in the understated lexicon of that breed 'a tippety-tap' with a BFH. Three of said 'taps' were required to release this .... accompanied by lots of rusty-dust..



Been in there a while by the looks of it, and had surely blocked the drain - hence the corrosion in that corner only. All the other three drains were clear, so I poured some Metal Ready down them all to try and give the inside some rust protection. I had also replaced the drain tube on the replaced front RH inner wing. Used the old steel fuel line from the centre tunnel from the Doctors car- perfect replacement.



Then on to the two small rusted sections on the roof proper. First some surgery and treatment with phosphoric acid.




Weld-thru primer, cut, weld, grind repairs



Prime and done. Pleased with the outcome as these need to be perfect before paint as they are in a place where any defect will stand out like a spot on a cows arse.




So after painting all the underside with POR-15 rust encapsulator and seam sealer-ing the joints, I then did it all again with POR Tie-Coat Primer, that will now form the perfect surface for the Schultz and the paint



Just got to do the same under the bonnet and in the engine bay, and top coat the POR-15 in the cabin with Chassis Black, and we're ready for a trip to Charlie next Tuesday.

[KS]

Blimey! You work fast... Good stuff! Better start getting some new digital film for my Box Brownie!

[Darren65]

Great progress Mick, hope to see it in the flesh one day.

[MT]

All ready to go off to the body shop next week - inside coated in Chassis Black, underside, engine compartment and under the bonnet coated in Tie-Coat Primer.

But before I finished the painting and offloaded the shell back onto the dolly for transportation I thought it would be a great opportunity while it was upside down to build a small jig to set the front suspension in any future front pan replacement or other front suspension repair. As it has just come off the jig I knew it was on spec, but I checked the dimensions from the Workshop manual. Dogs Bollock spot-on.

Fit the bits to the car, and tack weld



Then off the car to finish the welding, et voila! As an aside I am prepared to lend this out to any DDK'er who is prepared to donate ££ to the DDK charity once I have fitted a front pan for a friend. PM me if you want to borrow.



Had a visit from Darren today to swap oil filter consoles - I'm losing a front oil cooler and he's fitting one. Must admit mine was no where near as clean and shiny as the one he brought. Seems a shame to move it from the lounge!

Anyway as another tangent, as you might have seen from my comment on Jack Olsen's famous US garage, I am in awe of what he has done, but astounded that he can keep it clean. As an illustration, here is my work area after this bit of body prep and making the jig ....... and I'd tidied a few things away before I took the photo! Spot the difference? Guess I need to catch OCD



Off on another busman's holiday tomorrow to visit another DDK'er and do a spot of winter coastal bird-watching.... more in a few weeks as the paint goes on.

[Highfield]

Another great project and advert for POR

Any yes I do get look for Jack Olsen's garage, and yes it is just a little bit tidier - http://www.carcraft.com/featuredvehicle ... ns_garage/

Ian