Tranny Rebuild Day 1 Teaser

[Wrecked944]

With encouragement and advice from the folks on this board (especially Chris Bennet and Jim Sims) I am attempting to rebuild and refresh my newly purchased 1974 915 tranny for installation in my 1980 911SC. I am working with my friend, William, and so far we are having huge amounts of fun. But we are also making a lot of silly mistakes and laughing a lot. So for amusement, I am developing a website to describe how NOT to rebuild a Porsche high performance transmission. I am, of course, highlighting our mistakes in order to provide humor but also including all the serious stuff. Believe it or not, I am NOT making this stuff up. Here is the draft of the first step: Draining Your Transmission Fluid...

1) With the help of a friend, lift the transmission and balance it precariously between the edge of your workbench and a nearby bar stool. If the bar stool is shorter than your benchtop, use scrap wood to prop up the transmission housing until the whole assemblage is teetering on the brink of disaster.

2) Place a bucket underneath the drain plug.

3) Using a 19mm socket wrench, begin turning the Drain Plug in the wrong direction (i.e. "Righty Loosy, Lefty Tighty"). This is going to be tough, so have your friend hold onto the tranny so you can get a lot of torque and tighten that puppy on. When this fails to remove the drain plug, try wacking the wrench handle with a hammer in the wrong direction.

4) When you realize you've been tightening the plug instead of loosening it, concatenate every known swear word into one long phrase. Repeat as necessary. Going forward, this procedure will be called the "Yoga Deep-Breathing Swear Word Technique".

5) Turn the wrench in the proper direction until the drain plug is loosened.

6) Reach under the tranny and grab the drain plug with your bare hand. Say the following while turning the plug, "Wow, it looks like the previous owner already drained the fluid."

7) Make a horrified "Eeeew !!" face as 30 years of brown sludge gushes all over your hand. Breathe deeply and swear.

8) Use a shop rag to wipe the oil from your hand. Set this rag aside on your workbench so you can forget about it and reach for it later in the day when you need to wipe sweat from your face. This will help create the distinctively randomized black "Braveheart" warpaint pattern on your face. Very popular with the ladies.

9) Try lifting the tranny off the bar stool by yourself in order to re-establish your flagging manhood and prove your undiminished virility.

10) Ask your friend to help get the tranny off your leg and up onto the workbench. Say something smart like, "Boy, those germans really over-engineer this stuff" or "These magnesium trannies were always a little heavy. That's why Stuttgart switched to aluminum in their later models."

11) Consider taking up alcoholism as a hobby since it is well known that beer can be used as an anesthetic.

Future installments will explain how to NOT read the Bentley manual and thereby remove parts out of sequence as well as a section on "using the wrong tool for the job" in order to guarantee failure..

I hope you are all amused...we are having lots of fun...

[ChrisBennet]

Go man go!
-Chris

[Jim Sims]

Take notes! Label and bag everything and pay attention to orientation and position of parts and put this information in your notes. Keep having fun. When you're done you'll understand how your transmission works and you will have also done something that only .0004% or so of the human race has done. Cheers. Jim

[JSDSKI]

Outstanding - but we must have pictures!!!

You know the kind - guys in lab coats with thick black frame glasses pointing at obscure parts with giant hydralic presses and factory tools made of unobtanium...

how about: confused expressions, an oily box full of nondescript parts labled as "gears" (that someone later id's - "isn't that the valve train of a '57 Borgward, the Drauz model ?)

It could be the "Reality" version of 911 Service and Maintenance

[Wrecked944]

Unobtanium !!

Unobtanium, unobtanium, unobtanium....

I almost hurt myself laughing when I read that....

Unobtanium, unobtanium....I can't stop saying it...

[Kemo]

Great Job...please post some pics!!

[Bob Goding]

I spent my working life in aviation and we had lots of stuff made from unobtainium and stupidium !

[HawgRyder]

Remember...when handling that expensive Bently manual....don't bother to wipe the oil off your hands...after all, that's why they print on expensive glossy paper...so that the oil will wipe right off!!
Bob

[tbitz]

Since I'm the type that can't remember what I had for breakfast, I used a video camera to record every part I removed. This way I could see the order when I put things back together. It came in very handy. I must have watched the "disassembly video" a couple of times when I put the 915 back together. BTW I have a couple of thousand Km on her now, as she shifts very smooth. In fact I was in second gear going to third yesterday when I got distracted (with my intake temperature experiments) and accidently shifted into 1st!! It shifted so smooth that I only realized it when I released the clutch. Before the rebuild, I couldn't even shift into first if the car was at a dead stop for one minute.

Good luck....

[cegerer]

"Unobtanium !! "

Wasn't that word coined by Mark Donohue when describing some parts on the 917/30???? -- Curt