I've been pretty busy on the 911 over the last couple of weekends.
Last weekend I took the chassis up to Damon's Series900 shop in NH to have the chassis pulled straight. That's still in the diagnosis stage as we try to figure out what is bent with it. Now with the chassis out of the garage it's easier for me to get to my parts washing tank and so I went to town on the transaxle. Here's how the case looks after I got done cleaning it with a copper brush, a screwdriver and some mineral spirits. It didn't take much elbow grease at all, just some patience to scratch all of the crud out of the corners.
Cars are so much more fun to work on when their clean!
Then I replaced the mangled O-ring between the right timing chain and the cam tower which took 5 minutes, and then put the right-side cam drive back together. After the spending a couple of hours timing the cam, the rest of it went together pretty quickly.
Then I replaced the 1st and 2nd gear syncro rings, and swapped out the 3rd, 4th and 5th gears to bring the highway revs down a bit after switching to tires with a smaller rolling diameter.
Previously my gearbox had the following gears:
1st: A 11/34
2nd: F 18/34
3rd: M 22/29
4th: S 25/26
5th: Z 29/23
Admittedly this is a nice close-ratio box for street use, but after switching from 205/55's to 205/50's, I found that I was cruising on the HW at a faster engine speed then I liked. So I'm changing the gears to the following:
1st: A 11/34
2nd: F 18/34
3rd: N 23/29
4th: V 27/25
5th: ZA 29/22
This will cut about 400 RPM off of the engine speed when I'm cruising down the highway, which should cut the noise a little and may also help my mileage a bit. In fact I should wind up pretty close to where I was when I had the larger tires on the car.
Hopefully this coming weekend I'll be able to finish putting the shaft-assemblies together for the transaxle, and confirm the shifting set-up on the workbench before putting them back together in the case.
