DDK - Die Deutschen Klassiker

Cheers Nathan,

I was thinking maybe more along the lines of 914mental.com

Someone once pointed out to me that my general car club's forum name "Darren C" is an anagram of "Car Nerd"



Today I’ve been tinkering with jet sizes in the carbs and painted the newly made engine lid bump stop bracket a satin black over yesterdays etch primer ready to fit to the car this weekend.
Being at home tomorrow in daylight I’ll take a few pictures of the fitted vac pipe and bracket.

Half the day today was written off thanks to the fookwit PO of the Audi I bought last Saturday. I got up early and today was the first day in a week that I have been at home in daylight. I went to move a few cars around and found two flat tyres on the Audi. I used my foot pump to inflate them and went to check the other two’s pressure and could hear a hiss from a third tyre. Not impressed I took the car down to my local Tyre garage and when they took the two tyres off with slow punctures they found what looked like old rope with a knot tied in it fed from the inside of the tyre outwards through two nail holes and cut off with a knife on the outside!
Suffice to say they all crowded around taking photo’s of these “puncture plugs” The tyres were so ragged from someone driving on them flat that I had to have two new ones. The third fortunately was a nail so I got this repaired properly.
While I was there we got a laser 4 wheel alignment done too. All a bit of a right royal expensive pain, considering I plan to change the wheels and tyres at some near point.
Obviously done as a bodge and certainly known about by the PO as it took 5 days to go flat and they’d been driven on flat for a considerable time and fooking dangerous to sell on like that.
Hey ho, the joy’s of second hand cars!
Suffice to say I didn’t start on the 914 until this afternoon. I fitted my freshly made bump stop and rubber to the engine lid first, perfect!
I then had a play with the Carb trumpets. I’d bought some nice billet turned ally ones and with messing about with the jets the otherday noticed that the flange on their base overhung the main jet holes just enough to make you have to take the trumpets off to unscrew the mains. This was obviously a faff, so I took them off and filed a neat semi-circular cut out in the flange to clear the jets and refitted them.
I then spent a few hours making one good underbody air deflector flap from two poorly molded Auto Atlanta replacements and tapped out the 3 mounting holes M5 to finish.
With the wind and rain picking up, I went back out to the garage and got under the car to remove the old remaining part of the broken off air deflector. I had to unclip the fuel pipes to get the old bolts out but once off I gave the area a damn good clean. The underside got touched in with stone guard and behind the fuel pipes above got a good coat of clear waxoil. All this should hopefully be dry by the morning so that I can bolt on the “remanufactured” air deflector.
As promised in between todays escapades I took a few photos in daylight (very dark cloudy daylight) of the engine bay to show the fitted vacuum advance pipe I made last week to sit neatly on the engine.

Very pretty Darren, love the way it curves around the timing plug. Looks 'factory' - except it's better.

Cheers,

That was kinda the idea....in one of my old job roles they nicknamed me "Carlsberg" from the ad slogan "if Carlsberg made"

Kindred spirits then - one of my old (and most enjoyable) job roles was being responsible for the design bucks when Vauxhall re-engined the Frontera range. Great satisfaction in getting everything to fit, look 'right', not fret on another part and use bits from the parts bin where possible. Good fun stopping the engineers from arguing with the CAD jockeys and fighting with each other over 'real estate' too.

Andrew

Very good Andrew, sounds just like my place, nothing changes, everyone pulling in different directions trying to make their mark re-inventing the wheel.

Today was a busy day with more driving lessons, working on the new Audi (fixing the tailgate latch flap cover and putting another coat of paint on the new brake disc hubs and edges) while trying to keep things pinned down in the very blustery wind.

I did manage to get the remanufactured air deflector fitted to the underside of the 914 and another coat of waxoil over the bolt heads!

With any luck the wheels might just be ready from the blasters tomorrow.

Today was a long day.
I was out of the house and off to work by 6am and I have only just got in at 11:25pm !
Straight from work I had a car club committee meeting that went on a while.
Anyway the good news is that I managed to pick the wheels up from the blasters and it was well worth the wait as they’ve done an excellent job and understood everything asked of them.
This is “Stage 4” of the wheel restoration.

Stage 1 was the clean, scrub and cif to get the dirt grime and brake dust off after the tyres were removed including hours of scraping with soft aluminium home made scrapers to get the black tyre bead marks and old wheel weights & stick foam off the rims. This left cleanish wheels with a good amount of surface corrosion on the rear inside rims.

Stage 2 was to bead blast the rears to remove the corrosion and leave an even finish, plus cleaning them perfectly ready for Stage 3 (which they would only do with clean wheels)

Stage 3 was the electrochemical stripping of the anodising.

Stage 4 was the removal of all marks, scratches and damage to the dull areas of the wheels in between the polished rim and petals, including slip scratches from wheel braces, PO scraping off scratches from old wheel weight removal when the tyres had been changed and the removal of screwdriver lever marks from old centre cap removals.
Here’s a couple of pictures from tonight after bringing them into the house.



This is still bare metal, no coatings or paint.



Stage 5 will be the Polishing of the appropriate areas only and 6 the re anodising.
Tomorrow I need to spend a few hours tweaking the polishing templates and centre discs I’ve already made before I’m happy to drop them off at the polishers.

How did the factory do the same on the wheels in manufacture?
I imagine they cast. machined and polished on a lathe then anodised?

Pretty much, Yes.

It's only so long winded now as I'm undoing years of damage, corrosion and dealing with removal and re-instatement of the electro plating to restore them to their former glory

Before work and after this evening I’ve been working on the polishing template/guards.
I plan to drop all the wheels off at the polishers in the morning so needed to make sure all the polishing templates were a good fit. Time spent on this is well worth it for a good lasting result.
The first template is 2mm steel and solid so it wont deform. This sits level in the wheel and I designed it to be used purely to polish the outer rim and leave a neat line between polished and matt alloy to match the original.



The second template is 1.5mm aluminium that I have worked by hand into a convex dish to sit perfectly around the petals. This is for polishing the petals only. I also made two centre discs to sandwich the middle of the wheel to aid petal polishing and a “spring” ring to sit inside the rim to stop the polishers catching the matt area.



With the aid of 14mm bolts everything is locked in place so that the polished shapes are uniform around and between each wheel.
I’ll load them up in the morning and drop them off before work.

Wow! Impressive work as always Darren...

Thanks Stuart,

I dropped the wheels off at the polishers today. The bloke took one look and said with a sharp intake of breath "oooo they're a bit fiddly!"

"Fiddly, fiddly" After all my effort in making the templates so they can go wild with the polishing heads without getting it wrong, the chap thinks they're fiddly
Just a load of twaddle imho to justify him trying to charge me more money!

Well, we'll have to see. He thinks he'll get one polished by the end of the week for me to inspect.

Until then I'm tinkering with rebuilding/refurbishing the whole braking system on my new Audi A4 wonder bus that I bought the other weekend to replace my V70.

f*** him off and get someone who doesn't do sharp intakes of breath.

After that much dedication to the templates you should finish the job and polish them yourself. You clearly have the skills!

Cheers Jamie/Gary,

I'm far too lazy to polish them myself