DDK - Die Deutschen Klassiker

Thanks for the offer Stuart; they assure me that the steering wheel will be redone immediately so if its okay with you I’ll hold on a while before taking you up.
Today I carried on with the passenger door cubby repair. The bonding agent on the angle stainless reinforcement was dry this morning so I cleaned up any excess that had squeezed out. Since the cubby had been damaged before I got the car the pieces were completely missing around the mounting hole.



With the stainless angle in place I had a good base so taped up the edge and hole to make a trough (mould) and mixed some flexible plastic bumper repair 2 part resin and poured it into the mould and let it dry while I went to work.
This evening when I got home I filed and sanded the resin down to blend in and re drilled the hole.



The repair was finished off with a light coat (localised only over the repair) texture coat spray. Not exactly a grain texture, but close enough to hide the repair to the eye.



Working inside my shed I had no issue with light, so carried on and made two Aluminium speaker mounting plates to match the cheap cardboard originals.
With 3mm aluminium sheet there was no need to make the sound obstructing X in the centre, so hopefully they’ll be some better sound from my new upgraded 4” speakers.



By the time I’d drilled all the holes and cleaned off the burrs it was time to call it a day.

To be honest Darren, I quite liked the other speaker mounting plates !! )) kind of retro !??

Thanks, I kinda like them too, especially the now political incorrectness and stereo (no pun intended) typing of the Nationality Play Puzzle images.
I can’t bring myself to throw them away!
Does make me wonder if anyone else’s 914 has these hidden away… maybe we could get together and complete the play puzzle set.

Today was an interesting day, I spent most of it having my leg pulled at work. I was unintentionally on the ITN 10 o’clock News last night and more people than I’d hoped had seen me. In fact it was a tea spitting out surprise when I happened across it myself last night.
Yesterday was the UK Media launch day for the new Rolls-Royce Dawn, that I have been involved in helping design and put some of the infrastructure in place for manufacture over the last 3 years at work. Last month there was a lot of secret filming with Jodie Kidd and that was all last minute.com to sort it out. I can tell you now as it’s no secret any longer with the cars launch yesterday at the Frankfurt Motorshow.
Anyway this is a Porsche thread so I’ll stop there; but if anyone wants to discuss, know more, pm me or search “Darren Collins Rolls-Royce” on google & youtube. (There’s some Porsche Cayenne stuff too if you click on my name below any of the video’s you can find it all).
Moving on…
This morning I sanded down the speaker plates to key them and gave them a couple of coats of satin black before leaving for work.
During lunch I had a bit of a run-around looking for some speaker cloth. The plan is to mount the new speakers in the new brackets then cover the face with black speaker cloth before fitting into the housings. My new speakers have little in built tweeters in the centre that are a bit of chrome bling and would stand out a mile looking through the bars of the speaker housing so the material should hide them and do the trick. Anyhow the two places I had enough time to visit were out of stock, but hopefully I have a 3rd in mind tomorrow so will ring ahead this time to save a wasted journey.
This evening when I got home I gave the mounts another coat before starting to make a good set of speaker housings from the damaged ones. Fortunately I have most of the broken bits and enough damaged housings to cut up and make a good set.
I started the same way as the door cubby with bending up some thin stainless sheet. This time though, because I had broken bits I could carefully glue them back together with ABS plastic waste/drain pipe adhesive from the plumb centre. I’d tried a bit on the rear of the housings a few days ago to determine what type of plastic it was and which solvent glue dissolved it or just set on the surface and peeled off. The former I found, was the standard ABS glue for the white plastic household waste pipes. Carefully applying a tiny amount to the pieces I glued them back together and made the missing pieces (like a jigsaw) from the spare damaged housing I have and glued them in too. After about half an hour it was dry enough (but fragile) to use the polyurethane bond to attach stainless re-enforcing plates behind the joins. I’d key sanded the back of all the pieces before gluing together and sanded the stainless to key that, so the housing was ready to bond on the plates already. Cleaning and tidying it up I’ve left them to dry now until tomorrow.

Slight detour but ..... What is a cayster?

Hi Bruce,
It’s the same as a Boxman……
That was an old project car I built a few years back. I took a 1998 Boxster and fitted 2007 Cayman front wings, bonnet, lights, rear bumper, spoilers and front Z-art Cayman bumper with 19” Techno alloys. It was half Cayman/half Boxster so I cut both rear script badges apart and invisibly joined them so that it read “Cayster” across the boot. I clay modelled new door handles and had them sand cast in aluminium, and hand made a few other unique bits and bobs.

A bit of fun really, but it was a Marmite car, some people asked “Why?” some people thought it was great. I did it just because no-one had done it before. I’ve owned and modified dozens of Porsche cars (across the model range) over the last 30 years including building and using Strosek, Speedart, Z-art, Techart & Ruf parts plus designing and making my own body panels and mechanical parts.

Years ahead of your time
Outlaw Boxster are definitely the future

Thanks Bruce,
I never thought about it that way although I do admit that I always seem to be trailblazing when it comes to cars. At work we are sometimes a decade into the future and I kinda think it must rub off on my choice of classics and modified cars. Thinking more about what you said, I was one of the first to build a VW wizard roadster beetle in the UK in1983 working with Chris Boyle himself. The first person I know of (although someone might prove me wrong) to update a 911 SC to a 964 in late 1989 from moulds taken off a brand new car. The first person to put 959 rear quarter air intake ducts (again home made) into a 911 SC, the first to put turbo twist alloys on a 944, the first to put carrera cups on an early 911, the first person to trial the Compomotive PH (which was a mm perfect Fuch copy but in a split rim that Fuch took Compomotive to court over and stopped them producing back in 84, but ideal to get a good tailored offset when fitting turbo arches to an SC without spacers) etc etc (there are many more I can think of, but that’s for another thread topic another day).

Today I spent the day finishing off repairs to the two damaged speaker housings. Much like the door cubby but I discovered they are made of the same plastic as the rear light housings. Since I polished them with Brasso to a fantastic shine I gave the speaker housings a go too. There are multiple repairs where I’ve glued them back together and made new bits to fit in where parts were lost, so a 1200 grit wet and dry was require over the joins before the Brasso.
I’m really pleased how they’ve come out, and challenge anyone to spot the repairs!



Brasso is wonderful on this type of plastic for turning a sows ear into a silk purse.



With the housings all done now I riveted the new speakers into the newly made mounting plates as per the ones I’d removed. The rivet heads were blacked out with a little paint and left to dry.



Due to the numerous bits of stainless re-enforcing plates behind the plastic housings, I had to cut out a small relief in one of the speaker plates to give clearance for it to fit (top plate in picture)
At lunchtime today I called ahead and found a supplier with black material in stock to cover the face of the speaker and plate. They cut half a metre off the roll which was the smallest amount they do and asked for 49p I gave them a quid and said keep the change.
The plan for tomorrow is to cover the face of the speakers and fit them in the housings ready for assembly at the weekend.

They look great, well worth all the intricate effort!

ps:
I have a set of 7" Compomotive rims on my 911 hotrod!

Cheers.

7" compo's eh.....but what design?

Just spent an hour in my attic looking through old car build photo albums and found the one for the 911 "turbo" I built over 30 years ago, took out the old picture and took a digital copy.

Here's what the Compomotive PH 15" split version of the Porsche Fuch looked like with a large offset to fit Turbo arches without spacers



Its been over 30 years since I've seen another set of these, and then it was only in the Dage brochure, never saw another set of 15" on a car in the flesh before they were banned from selling them, changed the design slightly to stretch the Fuch spoke and move the split rim bolt out of the top of the "petal", went to 16" and made the opening inbetween the 5 petals/spokes smaller for a very short production run.

Mine are like that.
They have a one-piece rim and bolt-in centre.
Came off a 911E racer in about 1991 via Bob Watson and a guy called Oliver.

I think there was a version with two rims and the centre, a 3 piece wheel.
They seem quite rare.

WOW what are the chances of that! They are Uber rare especially in the 15” size. Yes they are a 3 piece wheel. When I bought mine new I had to do some careful measuring to size the inner and outer rim, not only to fill the arch aesthetically but also to clear the suspension & inner arch. Easy on the rear, but the front was a little more tricky as the wheels steer and “going wide” which was the trend in the early 80’s meant I had to allow for tyre size. Being one of their first customers with a non-standard car (turbo arch mods on an SC) they had no records to fall back on. I remember we built 2 size front wheels to see which was best before purchasing a set. Tyre size options were more limited back in the day so mostly 60 profile was considered low and most of us ran around on 80 profile “balloon tyres” in those days.
Look after them!

Your outer rims look different though with a set in cast panel with writing in????
Mine didn't have this. Maybe its because as you say yours are 2 piece and mine were the 3 piece very early version

Yep - I've got a couple of those centres as well, and 3 or 4 x 7" rims. I bought them for spares for the Compo rims I run on the Hillclimb car.



JW

PS - you have to be careful with the Fuchs lookalike centres, they are prone to cracking around the wheel bolt holes, partly since they are only cast, not forged like the originals.

Yes, I check mine quite often, but ok so far and use 70 ft.lb or the nuts.

iirc they were used like mad in the GIROFLEX (?) series then became unavailable (now I know why).
I hill climbed on these for some years, then used 7 x 15 Cookies with the Kumhos.

Darren: sorry for the drift of your excellent thread.

No prob’s on the drift; I kinda started it

Anyway great cars (and wheels) Guy’s!

Back on track with the 914 today I fitted the speaker cloth to the new speaker mounts and fitted them both into the housings ready for putting into the car tomorrow. It was a busy day (& week) at work so I was late home tonight and after food shop it was almost 9pm before I could start on the 914, but at least I got an hour in and finished the speakers off.

Today was one of those days where everything seemed to fight me.
With a glorious sunny morning I pushed the car outside so that I could open the doors fully and decided to take the knee roll back out.
Since fitting it a couple of weeks ago, I wasn’t happy with the way it now bolted in to the car. The knee roll was sitting ever so low and the stainless trim had a small 2-3mm gap before the basket weave panel. After some thought over the last week I realised the new vinyl used to re-trim folded over and glued behind the knee roll whereas originally it stopped on the edge. With the roll bolted in the new vinyl “return” was sandwiched between the roll and dash which was holding it down 2-3mm; particularly where it was folded over itself and 3 or 4 layers thick.
The only solution was to unbolt it and cut it back.
There was also an issue with the dashcap that was fitted to the dash before fitting the dash back into the car. This when put back in was pushed down ever so slightly on each end above the vent grilles as it squash back in between the windscreen pillar trims. This also pushed the knee roll down and added to the gap along the bottom of the basket weave.
Anyway I spent 4 hours on it this morning, cutting back, trial fitting, taking out again for more fettling and refitting a few times before I was 100% happy with it.
Once back in the stainless trim was close up to the basket weave and I could finally fit the rebuilt speaker grilles and test the Blaupunkt. All good!





I also fitted the repaired false cubby to the passenger door. Again it fought me for a while trying to get the 3 screws to find the holes in the steel of the door. I had to take it on and off a few times and add a little vertical pressure and use a scriber down the holes to guide it in. I didn’t want to drill any more holes in the door for the screws but after a frustrating half hour I got the first one in. After that the remaining two followed with ease.
All that’s left now is the steering wheel and the interior will be complete.
I also completed another job that's been bugging me over the last few months. The door hinge bolts. Taking them on and off, in and out, had chipped paint off the bolt heads and washers, so I carefully removed them one at a time (to keep the door alignment) and cleaned any chipped paint edges before putting them back in and then repainting them with a modellers brush. Over the course of the day I got two good coats on each bolt.
After a bite to eat I decided as it was such a nice day to wash out the engine bay. Since going into the paintshop, despite being covered it was absolutely full of dust from sanding down the original paint and flatting water mess from the primer, plus general dust from filler off other cars sharing the paintshop. It took a good couple of hours to get it half decent using 3 buckets of water, sponges and numerous detail brushes. Paint & filler dust is really difficult to clear as every time the water dried the white stains returned.
With it eventually clean, I pushed the car back into the garage and placed it on four axle stands.
This was a small milestone in the restoration. I’d wanted to get the wheels refurbished for a long while now but having to have the doors wide open refitting interior I need to be able to keep pushing it in and out of the narrow garage so the wheels had to stay on.
The plan now is to take them into work and get the tyres off at lunchtime so they can have the anodising electrochemically removed for selective polishing.
In the meantime while they are away over the next couple of weeks I hope to clean and refresh under each wheel arch and complete a few remaining mechanical jobs.


One small request....

Has anyone got a single original 914 wheel bolt for a 74 with Fuch ???(radius cup fit, hex head with machined on small shoulder to look like a washer and shallow dome head)
The car came with a single rogue Beetle bolt in one wheel which doesn't match.
Please let me know if any of you have a spare bolt that I can purchase.