Hey guys,
I am working (long term!) on a 911T, but things became difficult when I realized I needed a proper chassis jig to continue my project.
Celette's are available locally, but for a princely sum, which means that those who have them want to charge equally princely sums to put you car on them, and then insist on doing the bodywork as part of the deal. Not my sort of deal, so for long I have been hankering after building a proper jig. Unfortunately blueprints and chassis measurements were not the easiest to come by either, but after a substantial amount of effort I came across an original set of 911 blueprints that I could use as input into my design.
From the moment I got the blueprints, things evolved quite a bit from a design perspective, but after an extended period of design I came up with a final product rendering that looked like this:
The design work was basically free, but to have it made still needed money I didn't quite have lying around. In stepped a good friend who has a few Porsche's to restore, including a 356 Cabriolet "D", who was prepared to fund the lot, as he too is skeptical of just any old body-shop working on his cars.
With funding in hand I then contracted the manufacture out to a local engineering shop, and a few weeks and roughly US$2000 later, this is what we have:
Key features include retractable leg assemblies that allow the jig to be leveled, and removable castor wheels that can be used to move the jig around when the legs are fully retracted.
In addition the jig is re-configurable so that the drive-train can be installed or removed with the chassis mounted in place.
A further design feature is that is has been made a generic as possible, which means that we can now whenever we need just design a couple of posts, bolt them on, and then extend the capability of the jig to include other Porsche's, notably a 356 Cabriolet "D" that is awaiting restoration!
With the jig now done a and dusted (short of painting it in a Martini livery), I have now moved on to my next Porsche related fixture, namely the daddy of all rotisseries:
It features a rolling hoop type mechanism, but as s the case with the jig, allows for it to be reconfigured for other Porsche's.