[Walt Fricke]

James - when you have everything cleaned up, you can see what it takes to push the pins back in on your work bench.

Doubtless some piston holes, while within spec, are at the narrow end, and maybe some pins at the wide end?

I've used a propane torch for a couple of jobs on my SC. I can set it on the garage floor upright, playing on the aluminum banana arm to heat it up so I can get an old bearing out, and later a new one in. Lots of mass there. No real risk of overdoing the heat.

To unfreeze small screws down in the distributor so I could disassemble and repair it, I hit on using the propane torch. I over did it - all the plastic bits inside melted (not hard to replace, though), but luckily I noticed the aluminum starting to look, well, different. It was, it was just starting to melt - I had to do some filing and grinding to get the cap to fit right after I was done. It did break the screws loose, though, and the distributor works fine.

But controlling temperature to 80C with a propane torch? I suppose with gloves handling the heated cylinders wouldn't be bad. But the flame is well above 80C, there is oil all about, etc. And the shop manual doesn't give a Porsche tool part number for the electric piston heater they say to use. One of the limitations of the shop manuals is they were basically written for Porsche trained mechanics. Wayne's book, and Bruces, were written for the likes of us.

We've all learned something from this, at least I have.