1973 Porsche 911E RHD – Silver

[911hillclimber]

Thank you. I was thinking of the front indicators only. I think mine are white inside from when I 'did' them in '89 along side the rears.

Lovely re-build details, and so good to see the original parts restored rather than buy buy buy new.
Wonder why the rears are white and the fronts chrome from the factory?

[210bhp]

The reflective properties of the sidelights has more to do with the shape of the internal housing than the surface colour. For maximum reflectence it should be a parabola (similar thing behind electric fire elements in your lounge) so it has less to do with how shiny or what colour the surface is if the shape behind it is not maximized for reflectance. Same thing with the reflectors in your headlamps.

Regards
Mike

[Lightweight_911]

Wonder why the rears are white and the fronts chrome from the factory?

US-spec LWB cars had the internal surfaces of their front side light/indicator & tail light housings coated silver whereas the ROW rear housings were white inside - don't know the logic I'm afraid ...

[210bhp]

Possibly something to do with the different coloured lenses in each market?

Regards
Mike

[911GP]

The reflective properties of the sidelights has more to do with the shape of the internal housing than the surface colour. For maximum reflectence it should be a parabola (similar thing behind electric fire elements in your lounge) so it has less to do with how shiny or what colour the surface is if the shape behind it is not maximized for reflectance. Same thing with the reflectors in your headlamps.

Regards
Mike

I agree, Mike, the shape of the housing/reflector makes the main difference. With respect to the coating, I had read somewhere that silver is one of the most reflective materials and often old vintage cars had their reflectors silver plated, but it tarnishes with time. Most modern automotive manufacturers use vapour deposited aluminium and it is almost as reflective as silver (silver reflectance 0.955 and aluminium is 0.913 which equates to 96%). In comparison chrome is actually much lower at 0.606 which is 64% reflectance of silver.

Graham, I don't know why the factory chose to use silver at the front and white at the back either. Odd. However, if you have been happy with using white at the front since 1989 I am pretty sure it is good especially since they used white at the back anyway. After all, this is just an indicator not a lighthouse!
Hope it goes well.

Gitesh

[911hillclimber]

White there all are, or will be...
Humbrol gloss white has been used and is great.
The o/s front housing is shot to death at the mounting holes, a little task to fix today, but will detail on my re-paint thread rather than stain this one!

[911GP]

Engine

I mentioned before that due to a huge overspend, I cannot afford to have my engine rebuilt currently. There are probably some raised eyebrows amongst you but I never imagined the restoration would cost this much. Almost every stage has cost a lot more than I expected and I have spent a lot more on parts as well. Some of the overspend is due to the car being so rusty in the first place and other overspend is due to me, since I didn't want to compromise on quality or detail. Anyway, the car was running before so I hope that it is still ok.

Armed with a couple of toothbrushes (no joke), my dad and I spent four hours at Gary's giving the engine a clean and it came out looking ok. We considered replacing some of the tinware and powder coating the rest but then chose to leave it for now and do this later.





A previous owner had changed the heat exchangers to SSI units. They are old but actually looked good once cleaned. However, my old exhaust had holes in it so had to be replaced. I chose to go with a new Porsche one and to give it some protection, I had it ceramic coated by Camcoat in Warrington.





I had mentioned to Gary that I had a few oil drips coming from somewhere near the front of the engine and when we were cleaning the engine we noticed that there was quite a bit of oil sludge under the MFI pump. We could see that someone had previously repaired the MFI and one of the gaskets was missing and another had been overtightened so that the gasket was deformed. Gary changed all the accessible gaskets on the MFI and some others at the back of the engine. He also mentioned that the MFI had been installed incorrectly such that the timing would have been slightly off so he reinstalled it correctly after changing the gaskets.







Although it may not be as pretty as some of the other engines on here, the good news is it runs! And so far no oil leaks but it needs a proper test to be sure.




Kind regards
Gitesh

[sladey]

Good call on the engine - If it ain't broke then don't fix it.

Or, more usually, If it ain't broke, fix it until it is!

[yoda]

I think you have sensibly spent the money in the right place. Car is looking great.

[inaglasshouse]

Yep, good call. Anything that bolts on can be revisited in due course.
Except stuff that could kill you, like brakes and fuel lines.

[911GP]

Gary arranged for Graham to carry out a site visit to apply black paint around the seat rails, gear shift, doors and horn grill areas as per '73 cars:







John at Chesterton's aptly called the next bit gilding the lily. It is completely frivolous, but I managed to find some K bolts in Germany. Now there are "K" bolts and "k." bolts and ".k." bolts and probably some other iterations too but from photos of original 73 cars I have seen it is the capital K bolts with no dots that I would need. Unfortunately, not all the ones I bought were correct so I located some more, this time in the US. Gary had them plated in zinc yellow. We considered spraying the car with the wings on, then removing the wings or spraying the bolts on cardboard but finally decided on getting the suspension fitted, putting the wings on and then Graham would apply a light dusting of silver over the area. Graham did a superb job but these photos really don't do justice to the finish:







Gary mentioned that originally cars came with red washers but the ones Porsche now sell are black. So, I found a company that made red fibre washers. You can just make them out in the photo above.

I have some K bolts (various types) left over and will be looking to sell these if anyone is interested.

Kind regards
Gitesh

[911hillclimber]

Did ALL '73 911's have the blackened area around the inside door cards?
Also did all the cars have black behind the front black plastic horn covers?

My '73 T had no evidence of blacking around the door cards but the paint may have been removed in the distant past.

I have the chance to add these details on my re-build/paint.
Hope you can advise.
Graham.

[911GP]

Hi Graham,
The 73 cars I have seen have these areas in black and Gary Cook also thinks so (he was the one who mentioned it to me). Probably best to post a question in the pre-74 area and I'm sure someone with more knowledge can give more precise answer as to when it was introduced. Also take a look at some of the other DDK restoration threads.
Kind regards
Gitesh

[911hillclimber]

Thank you for the response, I'll do as you suggest.

[911GP]

It has been a long time since my last update. There has been a lot of progress but it definitely hasn't been a smooth journey, even with all the planning in advance. However, I am pleased to say the car is almost complete. I am way behind in updating you so please bear with me.

Indicator lenses

If you recall, I had some ropey but original lenses that needed some help. Gary said he has tidied up lenses in the past by giving them a polish but I thought I would have a go myself. Unlike earlier cars, these lenses are clear with the black paint edging and then orange lens colour applied. The first job was to remove the black edging. Gary recommended 1200 grit wet and dry but after about half an hour I found this was not working well. The lenses I think are polycarbonate and I had read on some modelling forums that it can go cloudy if subjected to the wrong chemicals. Looking at the Lexan website, they recommended Buytl Cellosolve for polycarbonate and it worked really well. I found it best to apply the chemical and let it work for half an hour or so and both the black and orange paint pretty much wiped off. With the curvature of the lens, this meant having to clean about 10cm at a time but it was far easier. After some time, I had cleaned all the paint off the front lenses and the black edging off the back lenses too. I asked Graham at Limn Historics if he would paint these for me and he chose to use a two part paint for the black edging for durability while I supplied him with a few cans of Tamiya PS-43 Translucent Orange paint for the front lenses. The lenses were sent to Gary for fitting up and he reported back with "bit of a problem". The translucent orange paint didn't give good results. It was gel like, a bit like Rowntree's orange jelly. Definitely not clear and I definitely wasn't happy. I had read successful results with this same paint on many forums so I was really disappointed with this. I can only think that in those cases the colour was sprayed on top of the existing paint rather than on a clear lens. Any way, I couldn't live with this so I cleaned off the Tamiya orange and this time it came off pretty quickly with a chemical recommended by a modelling shop, Carson Paint Killer (removes all Tamiya X, XF, AS and TS paint and PC ad PC lexan paint):



The modelling shop also recommended another paint, Tamiya X26, which was definitely a clear orange. Lenses were shipped back to Graham and this time the results were very good. In fact, so good that they were pretty much indistinguishable from some boxed, NOS ones I had picked up.



Lenses were sent to Gary and this time, much better results:



Kind regards

Gitesh