Adams Probe 16 Restoration Project...

[javadog]

That’s a pretty rare find. I’ve owned thousands of British magazines yet I’ve never even heard of that one.

[Wayne 962]

Originally Posted by javadog

That’s a pretty rare find. I’ve owned thousands of British magazines yet I’ve never even heard of that one.

Yup, random. I have an eBay search setup for "Probe 16", and someone in the UK put it up for sale. Still looking for a few others that I know of but can't find copies of...

-Wayne

[Wayne 962]

Here's something else I hunted down, from 1982 in the back of Road and Track:



The weird thing is that no one really knows who this Tersant fellow is. But I have a few pieces of documentation and a few news articles that talk about him and this car. But the ownership of it is well documented and very clear. Perhaps he was a dealer consigned at one time in 1982 by one of the former owners. I talked to the guy who used to own it in 1982, Professor / Dr Clyde Kwok and he has no recollection of this fellow. Of course, I think he's 90 or so now, so who knows. I can't remember where I put my keys a lot of the time, I might not remember something about a car I used to own 37+ years ago. I mean 37 years is a long long time - I was in sixth grade or so 37 years ago.

-Wayne

[biosurfer1]

Originally Posted by Wayne 962

]

The weird thing is that no one really knows who this Tersant fellow is. But I have a few pieces of documentation and a few news articles that talk about him and this car. But the ownership of it is well documented and very clear. Perhaps he was a dealer consigned at one time in 1982 by one of the former owners. I talked to the guy who used to own it in 1982, Professor / Dr Clyde Kwok and he has no recollection of this fellow. Of course, I think he's 90 or so now, so who knows. I can't remember where I put my keys a lot of the time, I might not remember something about a car I used to own 37+ years ago. I mean 37 years is a long long time - I was in sixth grade or so 37 years ago.

-Wayne

Wonder if it's this guy:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/guylain-defrance?originalSubdomain=de

He was in Montreal around the time of that ad though currently is in Germany.

[1990C4S]

Originally Posted by TimT

Its a linen phenolic dowel or tube

That's called 'micarta' where I live. You buy it from resistance welding suppliers...weird place to use it though.

[GH85Carrera]

Originally Posted by Wayne 962

Snip:


It's very similar to getting in and out of the 962, but both easier and more difficult at the same time. The center gauge pod gets in the way - you have to plan your entry carefully. Same as on the Porsche 962. The 962 is technically tighter, but there's no center gauge pod. With the Probe, if you don't know what you're doing, you get into the car with your legs bent, and then you can't extend them, and have to hop out. It's difficult to explain. On the 962 you lean on the bodywork - on the Probe (especially with my cracked windscreen) you don't want to lean on *anything!*

I've got a lot more photos, I will try to post 10 per day, starting tonight. Trying to get some traction on this thread, thank you everyone for commenting!

-Wayne

Wayne, you may well be the only person on the planet that actually KNOWS that comparison to be accurate. I doubt many people have ever been in and out of a personally owned 962 and the Probe 16 both.

[javadog]

I bet there are fewer people in the US that have personally seen one of these Probes than what normally attends a Thanksgiving dinner in my family.

The number that have sat in one? 4? 5? Outside of Wayne's family? 0?

[javadog]

Originally Posted by 1990C4S

That's called 'micarta' where I live. You buy it from resistance welding suppliers...weird place to use it though.

Cloth/phenolic composite materials have long been used as bushings. They have relatively low friction coefficients, good compressible strength, are easily machinable, are pretty stable and long-lasting and they won't abrade a metal shaft that turns in them.

[Wayne 962]

Originally Posted by javadog

I bet there are fewer people in the US that have personally seen one of these Probes than what normally attends a Thanksgiving dinner in my family.

The number that have sat in one? 4? 5? Outside of Wayne's family? 0?

When it was at the Petersen and available for inspection before the auction, I went down there. Well worth the drive just to be able to sit in it at the very least! Probably the coolest / most unusual car that I have ever sat in. I can't wait to get it back on the road. I'm sure like most of my other "cool looking" cars that I have, it will probably disappoint on the actual driving experience, but the actual cool factor will be off the charts. Honestly, it's really tough to beat a well-sorted early 911 or 914-6 for all around driving experience (combining sounds, smells, feels, and cool factor).

-Wayne

[javadog]

The engineering side of my brain has never been happy with cars that weren’t really will sort it out. I would take your 914-6 over the Probe , all day long and twice on Sundays. I doubt I could even get my butt into the Probe, at least without not breaking anything, as a condition.

I once looked at buying a Norwood P4 replica. Bob Norwood had, at least what seemed like, a pretty good reputation. He built quite a few of his replicas, more faithful than most, and so had plenty of opportunity to work the bugs out. Plus, the Ferrari P4 may be the neatest car ever built, if you’ve ever heard one driven in anger, in person. As it turned out, the car I drove was the biggest POS I’ve ever sat my butt in. 200 yards and I was done.

I look forward to seeing the pictures of this thing, I’m curious if any serious engineering went into it, or if it was built more like a kit car. Can’t wait to see where they got the suspension bits and how the motor and transmission were put together. If I’m not mistaken, the engine is installed transversely.

[Wayne 962]

On the steering wheel bushing - since this bearing is in very good condition, I will just leave it in place (our goal for this car is to reuse as many original components as humanly possible), and drill a new hole more towards the middle of the bushing, on the opposite side. That should fix the problem. Not a new Delrin bushing, but I think trying to unweld and modify the steering wheel when the existing bushing is still in very good condition would be be a mistake.

-Wayne

[Wayne 962]

Started working on the headlamp mechanism. It wasn't raising the lamps too easily - seemed like the mechanism was all gummed up:


The gear mechanism looks like it's out of some type of English tractor and then has been modified:




I took the whole thing apart, and found this spring on the inside that was looking worn out, so I lubed it and then I just removed it (it was a backlash spring):




Put the whole mechanism back together:




Guess what? It didn't really make an improvement! Frustrating!!! I'll put the spring back in when I have a few free minutes in the future. I think the motor may just have grease inside that is gumming it up or something like that. Or perhaps the cable that goes to the mechanism is gummed up. Or maybe the mechanism never really worked too well to begin with - it seems a big underpowered. It's a very cool setup with the lamps that popup like that out of the fender though!


-Wayne

[Wayne 962]

[size=3]
I'm not really sure what happened to the paint on this car. The car was owned by a few former rock stars, so maybe that had something to do with. It's as if the car was driven on a daily basis behind 18-wheelers on a dirt road. And then driven off road a few times with jagged trees and bushings scraping the paint. The body is fiberglass, so there's no real damage to any panel whatsoever. It's just these scrapes in the paint. I got some very expensive touch up paint at the auto paint store and used some paintbrushes that you use to paint civil war soldiers, etc. Left and right for comparison:



Looks 100% better, although still fairly bad looking at about 2-feet away. The orange does a lot to hide this stuff though.


Doggie approves!


-Wayne

[javadog]

When I restore something of that vintage, anything with grease in it gets completely disassembled cleaned and re-greased. Grease that old is non-functional.

That car will have been painted with single stage paint, build up the touch up paint in the areas where it has been damaged, color sand it and re-polish. If the paint is a good match, the repair will be virtually invisible.

[Wayne 962]

So, this odd looking device is the wiper motor. Apparently, it's a fairly rare one, used only on a handful of obscure Jaguars. The overall design is similar to ones used on more mainstream cars, but this one is the only one shaped at a right-angle for some reason. It has a wacky six-lead switch that controls it and sends power to various windings and shut off switches. I checked the continuity of the switch according to the diagrams on the Internet - came back okay. I hot-wired up the motor, and it didn't work. Took the thing to the bench, tore it apart and found that one of the gears had rusted up or gotten stuck. Cleaned the entire thing out and bench tested it - works!

The wiring in the car is crazy bad on this - someone used trailer wire combined with some other type of speaker wire or lamp wire to try to "match" the colors to what they are supposed to me. I just ordered some new wire (arriving today), and I will just rewire the switch and motor with a proper ground, routed through an extra fuse, and such.

The weird thing is that this car is an English car, and some English cars have a positive ground instead of a negative ground. So, the engine has a negative ground (the battery negative is connected to the block). But this wiper motor was wired with a positive ground. Crazy. And this couldn't work on a car that had a metal chassis (again, this car has a wooden chassis). If you mix two different grounds on a car with a steel chassis, it will blow up the battery in a few minutes. But here, you can do crazy stuff like that (perhaps without knowing), and get away with it "working".

So, when I rewire the wiper motor, I will switch it to a negative ground (what it should be according to the factory diagrams for the motor itself), and I will transfer the "hot leads" that were grounded to the chassis to a separate external terminal block that I just ordered on eBay (a new old stock one for a ham radio that "looks" correct).

Rare wiper motor:



Crazy front trunk wiring:



Here's the wiper motor that has had the cover removed:



Inside guts. ALWAYS TAKE PHOTOS! Some stuff fell out of here when I turned it upside down and I referred to this photo to make sure I put it back in the correct spot!



Close-up of the mechanism:



Photo of the back - again I used this photo to remind me where to put that washer!


This gear was stuck. This looks like I used the grip-of-death to get this off, but I really didn't. It came off pretty easily. I surely didn't want to break the plastic gears. Working on a car like this - there are *no* spares readily available, so if you break something, guess what, you have to make a new one. Which is what I don't want to do. Some / many parts are off of other cars, but some aren't:


I left the grease that was good. 50 years and most of it seemed pretty good. Actually, nearly all of it did - I think the gear was stuck on the shaft due to some rust / moisture that might have gotten in there. Again, the last time this was used was 37+ years ago (I was in sixth grade, and Michael Jackson's Thriller had just come out):


Motor windings:

[Wayne 962]

Video of it running using my power supply on the bench (I have multiple power supplies for bench testing stuff - SO USEFUL - for years I got by with testing using batteries and stuff. I don't understand how I did that for so long):



Testing the unit back in the car:



This afternoon, I will rewire the harness properly.

-Wayne

[Wayne 962]

What a mess! Testing out the new motor here, wired up temporarily (carefully) with alligator clip leads:


Decided to completely scrap the old harness because it was old and junk. Standard 16-14 gauge connectors, and I drop a bit of solder in:


Some heat-shink tubing on each connection, just in case:



Fits pretty well! This is the proper way to make a new harness:



New harness at home here on the wiper switch. This won't be visible, so all of this newness won't show:


Motor installed back again. That really long bolt there is temporary. I added a junction block as a common ground - the previous wiring had it all just jumbled together in a mess of solder and wire and electrical tape. I didn't have a proper length 1/4-20 bolt, so I used this one. I'll probably just mark this one to the exact length that I need and then cut it to length with a Dremmel tool:


Wipers working and running (and parking too). The mechanism is pretty cool, in order to park, it runs in reverse, which then activates a cam with effectively extends the arm until it hits a switch. This causes the wipers to park themselves much further off to the side than they would normally be wiping. Pretty cool design if you ask me!


-Wayne

[javadog]

Nice battery tie down...

[Wayne 962]

That's what I thought, until I removed the battery. The previous owner was 74, and that was simply a handle to be able to position the battery in place. It wasn't tied down. There's only one post and it's in the back - I'll have to figure out a clean looking tie down for this - I'll resort to a big zip tie in an emergency...

-Wayne

[Scott Douglas]

Seeing wipers running 'dry' on a windshield sends shivers down my spine.