That’s a pretty rare find. I’ve owned thousands of British magazines yet I’ve never even heard of that one.

Yup, random. I have an eBay search setup for "Probe 16", and someone in the UK put it up for sale. Still looking for a few others that I know of but can't find copies of...

-Wayne

Here's something else I hunted down, from 1982 in the back of Road and Track:

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1604886459.JPG

The weird thing is that no one really knows who this Tersant fellow is. But I have a few pieces of documentation and a few news articles that talk about him and this car. But the ownership of it is well documented and very clear. Perhaps he was a dealer consigned at one time in 1982 by one of the former owners. I talked to the guy who used to own it in 1982, Professor / Dr Clyde Kwok and he has no recollection of this fellow. Of course, I think he's 90 or so now, so who knows. I can't remember where I put my keys a lot of the time, I might not remember something about a car I used to own 37+ years ago. I mean 37 years is a long long time - I was in sixth grade or so 37 years ago.

-Wayne

Wonder if it's this guy:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/guylain-defrance?originalSubdomain=de

He was in Montreal around the time of that ad though currently is in Germany.

That's called 'micarta' where I live. You buy it from resistance welding suppliers...weird place to use it though.

Wayne, you may well be the only person on the planet that actually KNOWS that comparison to be accurate. I doubt many people have ever been in and out of a personally owned 962 and the Probe 16 both.

I bet there are fewer people in the US that have personally seen one of these Probes than what normally attends a Thanksgiving dinner in my family.

The number that have sat in one? 4? 5? Outside of Wayne's family? 0?

Cloth/phenolic composite materials have long been used as bushings. They have relatively low friction coefficients, good compressible strength, are easily machinable, are pretty stable and long-lasting and they won't abrade a metal shaft that turns in them.

When it was at the Petersen and available for inspection before the auction, I went down there. Well worth the drive just to be able to sit in it at the very least! Probably the coolest / most unusual car that I have ever sat in. I can't wait to get it back on the road. I'm sure like most of my other "cool looking" cars that I have, it will probably disappoint on the actual driving experience, but the actual cool factor will be off the charts. Honestly, it's really tough to beat a well-sorted early 911 or 914-6 for all around driving experience (combining sounds, smells, feels, and cool factor).

-Wayne

The engineering side of my brain has never been happy with cars that weren’t really will sort it out. I would take your 914-6 over the Probe , all day long and twice on Sundays. I doubt I could even get my butt into the Probe, at least without not breaking anything, as a condition.

I once looked at buying a Norwood P4 replica. Bob Norwood had, at least what seemed like, a pretty good reputation. He built quite a few of his replicas, more faithful than most, and so had plenty of opportunity to work the bugs out. Plus, the Ferrari P4 may be the neatest car ever built, if you’ve ever heard one driven in anger, in person. As it turned out, the car I drove was the biggest POS I’ve ever sat my butt in. 200 yards and I was done.

I look forward to seeing the pictures of this thing, I’m curious if any serious engineering went into it, or if it was built more like a kit car. Can’t wait to see where they got the suspension bits and how the motor and transmission were put together. If I’m not mistaken, the engine is installed transversely.

On the steering wheel bushing - since this bearing is in very good condition, I will just leave it in place (our goal for this car is to reuse as many original components as humanly possible), and drill a new hole more towards the middle of the bushing, on the opposite side. That should fix the problem. Not a new Delrin bushing, but I think trying to unweld and modify the steering wheel when the existing bushing is still in very good condition would be be a mistake.

-Wayne

[size=3]
I'm not really sure what happened to the paint on this car. The car was owned by a few former rock stars, so maybe that had something to do with. It's as if the car was driven on a daily basis behind 18-wheelers on a dirt road. And then driven off road a few times with jagged trees and bushings scraping the paint. The body is fiberglass, so there's no real damage to any panel whatsoever. It's just these scrapes in the paint. I got some very expensive touch up paint at the auto paint store and used some paintbrushes that you use to paint civil war soldiers, etc. Left and right for comparison:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605091433.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605091433.jpg

Looks 100% better, although still fairly bad looking at about 2-feet away. The orange does a lot to hide this stuff though.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605091473.jpg

Doggie approves!
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605091473.jpg

-Wayne

When I restore something of that vintage, anything with grease in it gets completely disassembled cleaned and re-greased. Grease that old is non-functional.

That car will have been painted with single stage paint, build up the touch up paint in the areas where it has been damaged, color sand it and re-polish. If the paint is a good match, the repair will be virtually invisible.

So, this odd looking device is the wiper motor. Apparently, it's a fairly rare one, used only on a handful of obscure Jaguars. The overall design is similar to ones used on more mainstream cars, but this one is the only one shaped at a right-angle for some reason. It has a wacky six-lead switch that controls it and sends power to various windings and shut off switches. I checked the continuity of the switch according to the diagrams on the Internet - came back okay. I hot-wired up the motor, and it didn't work. Took the thing to the bench, tore it apart and found that one of the gears had rusted up or gotten stuck. Cleaned the entire thing out and bench tested it - works!

The wiring in the car is crazy bad on this - someone used trailer wire combined with some other type of speaker wire or lamp wire to try to "match" the colors to what they are supposed to me. I just ordered some new wire (arriving today), and I will just rewire the switch and motor with a proper ground, routed through an extra fuse, and such.

The weird thing is that this car is an English car, and some English cars have a positive ground instead of a negative ground. So, the engine has a negative ground (the battery negative is connected to the block). But this wiper motor was wired with a positive ground. Crazy. And this couldn't work on a car that had a metal chassis (again, this car has a wooden chassis). If you mix two different grounds on a car with a steel chassis, it will blow up the battery in a few minutes. But here, you can do crazy stuff like that (perhaps without knowing), and get away with it "working".

So, when I rewire the wiper motor, I will switch it to a negative ground (what it should be according to the factory diagrams for the motor itself), and I will transfer the "hot leads" that were grounded to the chassis to a separate external terminal block that I just ordered on eBay (a new old stock one for a ham radio that "looks" correct).

Rare wiper motor:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605126635.jpg


Crazy front trunk wiring:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605126635.jpg


Here's the wiper motor that has had the cover removed:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605126635.jpg


Inside guts. ALWAYS TAKE PHOTOS! Some stuff fell out of here when I turned it upside down and I referred to this photo to make sure I put it back in the correct spot!
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605126635.jpg


Close-up of the mechanism:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605126635.jpg


Photo of the back - again I used this photo to remind me where to put that washer!
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605126635.jpg

This gear was stuck. This looks like I used the grip-of-death to get this off, but I really didn't. It came off pretty easily. I surely didn't want to break the plastic gears. Working on a car like this - there are *no* spares readily available, so if you break something, guess what, you have to make a new one. Which is what I don't want to do. Some / many parts are off of other cars, but some aren't:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605126635.jpg

I left the grease that was good. 50 years and most of it seemed pretty good. Actually, nearly all of it did - I think the gear was stuck on the shaft due to some rust / moisture that might have gotten in there. Again, the last time this was used was 37+ years ago (I was in sixth grade, and Michael Jackson's Thriller had just come out):
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605126635.jpg

Motor windings:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605126635.jpg

Video of it running using my power supply on the bench (I have multiple power supplies for bench testing stuff - SO USEFUL - for years I got by with testing using batteries and stuff. I don't understand how I did that for so long):

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/drnAL8M4PqU" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Testing the unit back in the car:

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605127546.jpg

This afternoon, I will rewire the harness properly.

-Wayne

Nice battery tie down...

That's what I thought, until I removed the battery. The previous owner was 74, and that was simply a handle to be able to position the battery in place. It wasn't tied down. There's only one post and it's in the back - I'll have to figure out a clean looking tie down for this - I'll resort to a big zip tie in an emergency...

-Wayne

Seeing wipers running 'dry' on a windshield sends shivers down my spine.

Is there a pin in the hole of the phenolic bushing or is it threaded for a set screw?

Yes, I only did that once, and made sure the rubber was okay, and the screen was clean. I wanted to see how it performed specifically with the wiper against the glass.

-Wayne

Enjoying this but concerned that this thread will give me bad dreams. You, sir, appear to be fearless! Keep at it!

Using cheap hardware store electrical terminals is not the “proper” way to build a new harness.

That car deserves OE spec double crimp brass terminals like every OE manufacturer uses.

I’m digging this build, thanks for posting, Wayne.

I think it’s safe to say that anything Wayne does will be an order of magnitude better than what was in there.

That's a good suggestion. Nearly the entire car is wired using the standard non-OE crimp connectors, so I was simply replacing / using what was previously in there before. In fact, I went to the car right now to try to find some non-plastic coating connectors, and it was a bit difficult to do that.

The goal is indeed to get the car running very soon without this turning into a 3-year total restoration. It's tempting to look this thing and say, "we need to rewire the entire car", and in reality, it could probably use that. But that would take a full 3-4 months and for this thing, I would rather only replace the stuff that definitely needs replacing and keep as much other stuff as original as possible...

-Wayne

This is a sample of what I'm dealing with (this is what it looks like currently):

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605643172.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605643172.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605643172.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605643172.jpg

The car supposedly didn't even *have* a fuse block in it when it was built (nothing fused). So, one of the previous owners put one in and rewired things a bit. It's a good idea indeed, but not exactly done in a super-logical way.

I've had to go through each component on the car, test it, check the wiring, and figure out how everything is all wired up. I'm working on an "electrical manual" that details each part, the part number, its individual wiring inside, etc:

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605643469.JPG

Also, a spreadsheet tracking the current (no pun intended) status of each component:

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605643540.JPG

-Wayne

Also taking copious notes. I found that printing out pieces of paper, writing on them, and then rescanning them into this master electric document works well.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605644173.JPG

The only person who will find this info useful will be subsequent owners of the car, and the person who will be restoring AB/2!

-Wayne

I have to replace a section of the wire harness. It looks like it got wet or sat near a fuel tank that was leaking fumes, or something. The wire is all brittle, black, and the insulation cracks when you bend it. Only in this area though, so I'm going to order some proper matching wire (not easy to find), and then patch in the new harness (26 connectors - that will be fun).


Here's the typical wire, I wanted to make it work, but it's just obvious that it's a bad idea:

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605644466.jpg

The insulation on this stuff just crackles and breaks if you try to bend it even slightly:

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605644565.jpg



I came across this component, which I've seen on and off throughout the years. I thought this was a terminal block, but there appears to be resistance across the terminals, so I'm not 100% sure. I think I've seen them before on cars I was parting out - it's not completely foreign to me, but I never took a very close look or investigated. I don't have an electrical diagram for this car, so it's anyone's guess where each wire goes exactly, but I think it's for the electric motor to raise the headlamps. I'm still confused as to what this thing is, I have not seen one of these before:

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605644596.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605644613.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605644613.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605644613.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605644613.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1605644613.jpg

-Wayne

Looks like a common ground that has a sacrificial zinc housing, but that is just a swag on my part.

Just ordered a whole bunch of new wire (and some new connectors) from Rhode Island wire (https://www.riwire.com/) - they seem to have the proper stuff in stock. The plan is to splice the new wire into the old harness under the footwell (where the wiring seems to be okay). With some careful soldering and some time spent on my stomach doing this (and breathing flux fumes), this should work well. I thought about using some type of bullet connector like they use on the 911s, but that would be less original than what's in there now. Again, trying to keep as much original stuff as humanly possible, while actually making it reliable (well, relatively).

-Wayne

Yes, that's pretty much what I thought too, although there's more resistance across these terminals than I would like to normally see. Almost like there are internal resistors or something. Or, it could just be really old and corroded like everything else in this area. I haven't traced all the wires back to anything else to figure out what these actually go to, but two of them have jumpers that go to the terminals on the headlamp motor switch.

-Wayne

From the other thread:

Yes, that's pretty much what I thought too, although there's more resistance across these terminals than I would like to normally see. Almost like there are internal resistors or something. Or, it could just be really old and corroded like everything else in this area. I haven't traced all the wires back to anything else to figure out what these actually go to, but two of them have jumpers that go to the terminals on the headlamp motor switch.

-Wayne

Since it is, or looks like, it's potted, maybe it's a common 'hot' spot. Does the center hole go all the way thru like for a mounting bolt?

I can appreciate that approach.


It’s interesting that half the fuse box has OE style terminals, it appears several cooks have been in that kitchen.

Could the potted square device be a voltage reducer for the gauges? Where do those wires go ?

Looks to me like a bridge rectifier. I used them in the past to covert between circuits/components that were AC but had DC available in the rest of the circuit. Or vice versa.

Crusty ballast resistor?

Wayne, that sure looks like a simple one weekend project.

I hate doing electrical work. I can't imagine that mess with no manual of current flow charts. It is sort of watching an archeological dig and trying to figure out what went where.

I guess you will have a full restoration manual with your notes and this thread.

It is a bridge rectifier. I think 4 diodes in series with taps at the corners?

Of course it would be something odd and unusual. This car continues to surprise even with the most simplest of things. What in heaven’s name would one of these be used for? I guess I need to keep digging.

More thoughts are welcome!

Wayne