The tale of 2 911-Ts

[jkap]

OK, time to finish the 951 chapter...

As soon as I see the dash light up, I freaked out! I though for sure the engine was done, it took a couple seconds for me to realize....it was still running....AND IT HAD NO OIL!!! I shut it off, and drug it home again. Ironically, I was able to coast to the exact same intersection where the car had stranded me a few nights earlier. Once I got it in the garage, this is what I found.....



I did not know if I was relieved to see that hole, or just in shock, or what, but somehow...it did not immediately bother me. I called Kevin right away, and he freaked out for me...what are friends for??

Here is another pic of the carnage...



Turns out, in addition to the oil pan, I took out the power steering lines, part of the subframe and the catalytic converter. At the end of the day, that rock cost me $3,800. More than Kevin paid for his whole 911!

Once I got the car back on the road, it was a blissful relationship. I drove it all summer for business (I am an on the road consultant, among other things...) In four months I put 7,500 miles on the car, and every one was awesome!

****OK, obviously something went wrong, or the car would still be here, right?****

Here's the thing...the car was too good. It got to a point where I was literally afraid I was going to kill myself. I actually turned the boost down to try to save me from myself! Why was I worried?? Well, I started by passing every car I came across on 2 lane roads...not bad you say...I agree. But 1 car at a time became 2, and then 2 became 3 and then 3 became 4. Finally, one day on a seven hour drive back home, I passed 12 cars in one shot, and hit 135 MPH doing so....that is was made me take some of the boost away (about 0.2 bar), and that helped....a little.

See, this type of thing is not an issue for me in the 911 for a variety of reasons. First of all, I would never use the 911 on a daily basis. In fact, after about 4 hours strait in the 911 I am ready to drive it hard into the nearest tree! Second, it is not that easy to pass things in the 911. I have to have a negotiation with it prior to each pass...The carbs have to sample the air, then the points have to take their own sample...then you have to request permission from the transmission to access second gear without nicking reverse. Only when you have received the necessary approvals and authorizations can you proceed with the pass. The 951 on the other hand, just did what you want...NOW!

Finally, late one august night, about midnight, I was on my way home from a trip with about 350 lbs of equipment in the hatch, and what pulls up next to me? a kid in a modded Subaru STi. For about half a mile, he taunts me, until finally the car forces me to take action. We hit it at about 60. (The worst speed to start in that car, as you are in 3rd gear with minimal boost). He gets about a half car jump on me and I'm having trouble pulling him back in Then I realize....I turned the damn boost down....DOH!! Finally I catch him and pass him at some obsene speed, at which point my elation is replaced with a shocking realization......I have all kinds of equipment in the hatch, and it is not secure enough to handle any type of emergency anything at this speed! If I had to hit the brakes hard...I would be dead!!

The next day I retired the car from daily driving and traded my wife for her Mercedes.

Long story short...she never liked the car, I was afraid to let myself use it daily, I preferred the 911 for recreational use, so the 951 just sat. The next summer it was for sale.

After the dust settled, I came to the realization that I had used all my free car funds on the 951 I needed a "market correction" car to recover and rebuild my funds for the 911. So I got a nice VW cabriolet, and began the waiting game. To make the money matters worse, I got this idea that pursueing a Ph.D. would make sense. All this lead to a long drought in 911 progress.

There were some great pictures in those monetarily deficient summers though....



For those interested, here are the final pictures of the 951:
http://homepage.mac.com/jkap/PhotoAlbum8.html

[quaz]

Well the summer Jay had all his bad luck with the 951 is the summer I was enjoying the new 77 911. It was an OK car....it was fairly quick, had shiny matching paint, but needed a little detail work. OK it needed quite a bit of detail work. Nothing major, but I just kept pulling new parts I put on my 71 on this 77. Don't get me wrong the 77 got better and better looking, but my poor 71 was now looking just as sad as when I picked it up.

Well I am not sure how it happed, but I somehow I learnd of a weird guy that lived down the street from me......well there is a corner or two.....who was working on a 77 911 as well. I gave him a call and he dropped by one day to see my red car. We talked for a bit. Apparenlty he was repainting his 77 and it had a 3.0 in it as well. That peaked my interest because I really wanted to paint my 71 myself, but hadn't done any body work in about 15 years.

........Now where did Ben go? This is where I need a pic of his car......BEN!.....BEN!.......You Around?......now that I need him he probably won't show.

Anyway, insert pretty pic of black 77 911S with SC fares on it here.

So Ben gets done with his car and I get to see it. It turned out really nice. He did a great job to it. Now I am inspired to get moving on my 71, but I have 2 problems. One is I have a house sucking down money faster than I can bring it in and two is I have a wife who will kill me if I have start sinking money hand over fist into a car at this point. So something had to give...............drumroll please............the 77 911.

Yep it went up for sale to do 3 things, one free up some cash to pay for some of the debt we accumulated on the Fing house, to focus me on one Porsche and three to stash some of the procedes for the 71 project. It took a couple of months, but I finally found a buyer and agreed on a fair price for the 77 and off it went. I payed off a few house bills, took a chuck of the cash and stashed it where the little blonde one couldn't find it and hunkered down for winter. No heat in the barn so working on the 71 would have to wait for spring.........man that was a long wait...........

Ben you around? (I think I may have scared him earlier.) You can show your money pit now.

[quaz]

Some before an after pics of the 77..

[mb911]

oh me?? I don't have a pic of the sc flares here but I have one of the second paint job

[quaz]

Hey I think we are finally getting to the good parts! Tonight I will start on what was to become of the my 71 911-T. The winter of 04-05 was long and hard, but I could still shop ebay and Pelican!

BTW Ben thanks for the gratuitous pics. That car is gorgous in person. Ben has done a great job on it. It has been a good inspiration to keep me going over the last 2 years.

[jkap]

I finally scanned some of the pics of the orange car when it first arrived home...


Anyone see an 'E' around here...mine may have fallen off somewhere in Ohio...



When parked next to cars that acually shine, the 'fuzzy peach' effect becomes more obvious.

These pics are dated 8/12/2001, a little better than 5 years ago....

For those asking themselves...."aren't we backing up a little here?" The answer is yes. You see, the next year or so in our little story does not involve a lot of me so I have to have my fun somehow

Don't worry, I'll make off color comments about Kevin and his car just as soon as he enters the "remodeling phase" of our little 911 saga

[jkap]

On a tangent....weren't point and shoot film cameras terrible?? I can't believe how spoiled I have become from even the most basic digital cameras....

[jkap]

Sorry...can't resist...I love this picture!

[quaz]

OK where were we???? Oh yes, the winter. Well I started ordering parts: RS door panels, seals, duck tail, s-front spoiler, sent gauges out to get rebuilt, hood badge, more seals, 8" fuchs, 7" fuchs, RS rear bumper, RS flairs, more seals, seats, steering wheel, shifter knob, trunk carpet, and probably about 20 other things. I was ready to go.

Although there is one note in there. In that list was an S-Front bumper. Originally I was going to go with that, but after seeing several R-inspired cars looking so hot with the stock front bumper I sold it. I was nervous about doing that, but you can decide later what you think.......

So first things first. The tranny is toast and I have to get to the bottom of that. First warm spring day the motor has to come out so I can work on that in paralell to working on the body. Here we go.

Then I cleaned up the motor a bit and figure out what was wrong with the transmixer. That took me most of the summer to rebuild, but I ended up replacing quite a bit in there.

[quaz]

Then came the body. I started by cutting up the rear fenders and putting on fiberglass RS flares. I am not sure if fiberglass was the right thing to do or not, but I dare them to crack! If they do I will replace them so fast with steel turbo flares it will make the car spin. I am not kidding on that either. Then I got the duck ready and started rust repair.

It had been about 15 years since I last welded, so this was a nice refresher course. I picked up a nice little lincoln welder from Ebay and it has re-payed itself 20 times since then. I love that thing.

Here are some various pics of the progress I made early last summer.

[jkap]

So, here is my first taunt. The motor has to come out of Kevin's car. Fine, I can help with that. We disconnect everything, get the car up in the air, rig up some furniture movers to slide the motor out once it is lowered, and start loosening up the front and rear bolts. I decide to head to the bathroom before we go further, and leave Kevin with the following simple instruction:

"Careful not to loosen the rear bolts too far...."

As I'm walking back up to the barn.......BANG!!

Fortunately, there was no sound following that.....I concluded that at least the motor did not fall on Kevin

I round the corner into the barn and there is Kevin with a dumbfounded look on his face, and the motor resting on the now smashed furniture hauler.

Kevin's first words?? "I wonder if it will go back in that fast?"

Shortly after that experience we got a screwdriver stuck in the left side heat exchanger .......... don't ask ...........

[quaz]

Man you will never let me live that down. More interesting is how we got the front bumper straight again. I swear who ever owned that car before me hit every parking stop in the entire city they lived in. It was twisted, dented, bent and warped. However it had no rust. So enough time with a hammer and it looks like a bumper again.

[quaz]

Over the course of about 4 months most of the car was taken down to either bare metal or the original coat of primer. I think all my clothes at home were light yellow for a month straight. It was quite a learning experience. However by the end of the summer it was starting to come together.



I thought for sure I was going to have this thing done by the first comming of cold weather! I was on target.

[jkap]

Originally posted by quaz
Man you will never let me live that down. More interesting is how we got the front bumper straight again. I swear who ever owned that car before me hit every parking stop in the entire city they lived in. It was twisted, dented, bent and warped. However it had no rust. So enough time with a hammer and it looks like a bumper again.

That bumper was the worst example of sheet metal I have ever seen, almost no part of it was good. Still, Kevin was obsessed with the notion of retaining his T bumper. I though he was insane...but what the heck why not give it a shot.

So, we hit it with hammers......then we got out bigger hammers...then we got a torch and heated it while hitting it with the bigger hammers. Eventually, the lump of metal started to look like a bumper again....although, it was hard to say for sure..... See, we had set the old paint on fire so many times that we were officially high from fumes. Fortunately, we were banging on the bumper in early spring, and the orange blueprint was still in the barn. After some comparisons, and a lot more banging, we pronounced it "a bumper." Of all the work we have done on those cars...I think I am the most proud of saving that bumper.....

Of course, it's still a T front bumper....what was he thinking???

After helping him straiten his bumper early in spring, I begin to fade into some type of emotional/mental burnout and become useless.....the result, Kevin is on his own working on his 911 and is forced to enlist the "help" of one our old friends, who has painted cars before, and should offer valuable guidance....

[mb911]

oh boy this where the fun starts

[jkap]

While Kevin's car is nearing "completion," my car is stuck in a rut. Kevin keeps trying to convince me to tear into mine, but I am content being able to drive it around. While I am fighting my way through my recent malaise, I begin dealing with some realities.....

One the one hand, my car gets all kinds of compliments....hell, it even won audience favorite at a couple of local, Saturday car shows...





On the other hand, my wife still thought is looked terrible, and while I did not agree with her, I was forced to admit that the car had many flaws. A lot of them coould not be captured by pictures, like the checked paint behind the driver's door, and the craters in the hood that I filled with touch-up paint. Also, on some parts of the car, the paint was so thin from buffing that it was becomming translucent. In fact, some parts were so bad that, forget about the camera, a blind man could see the problem at 50 feet!!



Then, there was the problem I had been trying to ignore since I got the car home.....The screw holes that held the chrome trim to the rocker panels had gotten....shall we say.....slightly out of factory specification.....




Add to that the fact that Kevin kept reminding me that I have had a clear vision of how this car should look for about the last 20 years, and its current state was not it, and the pressure to take action was getting immense!

Still, I was unsure. I had a business to run, school to worry about, 100 or so students demanding my attention, and the 951 had drained most of my funds...

Then, one day, I was out at Kevin's helping piece his car back together, and Ben stopped by..... We started talking, and I mentioned that, I liked the way Kevin's turned out, but I definetly want to do steel flares on mine.... Ben mentions that he happens to have a set of steel SC flares......and oh, by the way.......he is a professional welder.........HHHmmmmmmmmmmmm

[quaz]

OK a little philosophy before I start showing some pics of the car painted. Way back when we were in high school Jay and I worked for a friend of ours' father in his body shop, it was pretty much a one man show, but we helped out where we could and soaked up as much from the guy as possible. He was a 914 nut so Pcars visted his shop on occassion. What I learned from this talented man were two things, never lick a fresh weld and I don't want to work as a body man. I like working on cars, but if I had to fix minivans and Ford Taurasses on a regular basis I would go insane.

The other thing I remember from my youth I was told at a local muscle car show. My father's best friend restores Camaros (67-69 only) and also is fun to be around. Well as we walked through the show I didn't really notice many of the "stock" cars, but more of the hot rods. What Bill told me next was "Anyone can restore a car. It takes a real man to cut one up". In the last 2 years this keeps creeping back into my mind as I see restored 911-Ts sell in the 20s and low 30s for really nice examples. Don't get me wrong you see RS clones selling for 40-50K sometimes, but not often. Anyway, these cars are not getting any younger and even the Ts eventually will become scarce. However, based on what this Jack guy that floats around this board did to his car I pressed on. Grinder in hand and welder in the other I cut, shaved and flared!

[quaz]

OK so after a summer worth of work I finally got the car painted and started to re-assemble it. The paint turned out OK. I guess was happy with it, but I think I could have done better. A little more time blocking and filling and I could have got it perfect, but hey it was my first time in 15 years doing this. Next time it will be better. Whenever that is

[quaz]

Now that my car was close to done I had to get Jays butt in gear. I proved mear mortals can paint a car. We had a welder to do his rockers and the flares. What was he waiting for? A stick in the eye? Let's get that POS going so one day we can have cars we can drive. Wait, his was driveable.......mine was the one you couldn't drive.......hmmmm. I see his hesitation, but it had to be done!

[t6dpilot]

Kevin, you are a brave man! I am enjoying hearing about your adventure. Keep it coming.