Maybe Recessions aren't All Bad -- Now I've got time to work on my Porsche!

[jluetjen]

My apologies to anyone who is "between jobs" right now. But for the last 9 months I've been going flat out with my day job, and luckily able to drive my 911 prior to the roads being treated with salt. But now everyone in my company has been encouraged to burn-off vacation time and so I've got some time on my hands to fix some of the nagging problems on the car.



- Transmission issues:

1) 1st and 2nd gear Synchro's are shot (as a result of engine issues 1 and 2 below)
2) Leaks lube through the shifter seal, even after I tried to fix it (aka: bugger it up!)
3) 4rd gear whines
5) 5th gear is too short for highway use after I switched tires from 205-60's to 205-55's.

- Engine Issues:
1) Throttle bodies leak (this combined with item two below have resulted in the idle being too fast.)

2) #3 air bleed screw is clogged
3) Timing chain cover leaks between the cam tower and the cover

- Chassis Issues
1) RF strut tower was pushed out (not enough negative camber)
2) RR suspension was pushed in by the PO with the result that I can't get enough toe-in and the car has spent the last few years crabbing.


So the plan right now is to take the chassis up to Damon at Series 900 in NH to hopefully get pulled straight. Drop the throttle bodies over at Eurometrix which is thankfully located in the next town, and then start to rebuild the transmission and swap-out the 3rd, 4th and 5th gears to offset the 3% reduction in rolling radius of the 205/55's. This should make highway cruising a little less noisy and improve the mileage slightly. I'll also take apart the right side timing chain cover (and chain, sprocket and etc) to replace the seal. Hopefully I can get it all back together before April. It should also keep me distracted from the fact that my E-prod project is going to be delayed for another year or two. You can see that engine sitting on the left in first picture.

[MotoSook]

That's a nice project list, John. Glad you've got time to wrench....have fun!

[cool5]

Nice to be able to address those nagging issues. I love it when you have time and money, unfortunately for me it's usually one or the other.

Cheers,

[BK911]

That's a pretty long list. How much vacation do you have?

[jluetjen]

Originally Posted by cool5

Nice to be able to address those nagging issues. I love it when you have time and money, unfortunately for me it's usually one or the other.

I've often made the same observation.

[jluetjen]

Back again. I finally finished taking the cam sprocket off this morning and when I took the inside seal cover off, I found this...



It came off easily, so the condition of the seal isn't the result of my removing it, but rather it looks like it got pinched during assembly, not to mention the PO didn't use any sealant on the gasket. That seems to explain the persistent engine leak. I'll fix that when I put it all together.

I also finished taking the transaxle apart and found the usual suspects...
- worn first and 2nd gear syncros
- rounded teeth on the first and second gear sliders.

Now I need to get everything cleaned up and start putting things back together.

[jluetjen]

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.

[jluetjen]

I took my car up to Damon's Series 900 shop to see if he could fix the fact that my chassis has had twist in it since I bought it. Basically the only way that I could get the wheels to point in the same direction was to have it crab to the right by about 3 or 4 degrees. My theory was that during an accident by the PO that the torque tube was displaced. I also had a more minor problem in that RF strut had more camber in it then the LF.

Within a week of dropping the chassis off at Damon's Series 900 shop in NH, he had it up on the rack...



...and confirmed that the back end is square on!





But... apparently the RF strut tower was at least 1/2" back of where it should be!



Ulp!

In talking with the PO, we determined that he had replaced the sills...



... by brazing them on. OK, that is certainly a way to do it, but most likely not the preferred way. It's also unclear how he braced the chassis while he was replacing the sills. We suspect that the chassis sagged when the sills were open. So Damon is pulling the sills off, and then we'll see how the chassis straightens up and then he is going to hopefully put the sills back on with the chassis straight.



If he can't re-use the existing sill, we'll then have to do new sills.

Unfortunately the budget won't allow a full strip and repaint at this time, but Damon's being good to work within the project scope.

In other news Matt at Eurometrix has told me that my throttle bodies are ready. I'll post some pictures when I get those back. I guess I better get cracking on putting the transaxle back together!

[jpnovak]

John, You are really making some good winter progress. I am sure you will be on the road in no time. It would seem that the tub is in good hands. I think my car has the same front strut problem as a result of a frontal impact. One of these days I will get it pulled straight. Until then I will continue to enjoy. I was able to align mine so its not too bad.

[jluetjen]

This afternoon I was finally able to get the updated differential back together. I'm tied up tomorrow and don't think that I'll be able to get the transaxle together until next week. Chances are Damon will be done by that point too.

[jluetjen]

I just stopped in to pick up my throttle-bodies from Matt at Eurometrix today. They came out really well. A small detail is that he had to replace one of them since the boss for the adjustment screw was cracked. This led into a whole discussion about what these things are made out of. Most of us assume that they are mag, but to be honest the bare casting feels too heavy to be mag. Matt was going to try to ignite some of the shavings to see if they burn or not. Anyhow, here they are!



I can't wait to get them on the car and experience how a proper idle feels rather than the 1200 RPM that it used to have.

Not much else to report in regards to transaxle nor the chassis yet.

[smac]

Wow! This a cool thread. Keep us posted!

[SteveM911]

Very interesting thread regarding the body alignment,

Will be following to see how you get it straight.

[jluetjen]

I just heard from Damon that he is almost done with the car. He wasn't able to get all of the mis-alignment out of the RF strut tower, but he's got it back into the range where the car can be aligned straight -- which is what I was looking for. So it looks like the PO's sill rework ended up causing most of the problems. Thankfully there wasn't much rust in the sill areas. Hopefully I'll have the chassis back in my garage in the next week or two. I better get the transaxle back together and put the injection back on.

I'll post pictures when the chassis is back.

[jluetjen]

Progress!

Last weekend I got the drivetrain bolted into the car, and spent the rest of the time removing the remains of a snapped bolt in one of the drive-shaft flanges. I wished that I had remembered to do that when it was on the bench! After breaking off an EZ-out, I ended up using a few drill bits and drilled the snapped bolt (and EZ-out tip) out of the hole. After that I installed a helicoil which fixed the hole up great. Needless to say there was much cursing and gnashing of teeth during that job.

Today I finally finished up torquing the half-shafts, and then reconnecting all of the engine connections. Just around dark I pushed it out of the garage and tried cranking it over on the battary that hasn't been touched or charged since the fall. After cranking it over a number of times to build up some oil pressure, I gave it a shot and and starting right up. The hand throttle didn't work, but the oil pressure looked good and the car wasn't smoking or leaking. The idle is still a little fast at 1200. I've got to double-check the timing (which I haven't touched) as well as the throttle linkage to make sure that the throttles are fully closing. That and there were no brakes except for the parking break since Damon had taken the calipers off.

I did get the car turned around on it's own power and back into the garage. The idle sounds a lot smoother with the refurbed throttle bodies. There are no pops or misses.

Finally I put a dry pan under the engine to see if any oil collects.

Hopefully next week I'll be able to bleed the brakes and set-up the suspension.

PS: I just remembered that getting the car into 1st gear with the new syncho in place was so easy I neglected to even mention it. It's like the car has lost it's need for the various secret techniques like shifting into 2nd before 1st. Shifting into first gear from a stop was as easy as any "normal" car. Now that I've gone and fixed the car's various foibles my wife is most likely going to want to start driving it!

[jluetjen]

I just took the car up and down the street today to get some air in the tires at my local gas station prior to doing the suspension set-up. The engine ran fine and after sitting the pans under the engine are almost perfectly dry (keep in mind I didn't do a complete rebuild, just the known leak behind the right cam sprocket and the transaxle). A couple of issues that I need to look into...

1) The engine really doesn't idle much slower. After flowing the TB's on a bench Matt thought that they were set for the car to idle at 900 RPM, while it seems that the car wants to idle at around 1100 RPM still. Now I haven't gone through the tune-up/CMA routine yet, nor has the engine really gotten warm. I've only driven it for about 1 mile plus running it in the drive way. I'll look into the engine tuning after I get the suspension set-up -- hopefully this weekend.

2) While gently shifting up through the gears on the way to my local gas station to I found that the gear box balked going into 4th gear. 5th worked fine, but it was like it wouldn't go into 4th. No gnashing or anything, it's just the shifter wouldn't go there. On the way back it shifted into 4th just fine. I suspect that the synchros may need to break in a little bit, but has anyone ever run into a similar problem in a 901/902?

We're getting there!
- John

[Flieger]

I lost 4th completely in my 1971 911S with the 911 pull clutch 901 transaxle.

New shift rod guide bushings and a coupler adjustment made it slide nice and smooth into 4th.

[jluetjen]

Another weekend with two steps forward and one step back. This weekend my goal was to corner weight and aligned the car. It worked out a lot better compared to prior to Damon straightening the body, the car is obviously straighter then it used to be. I got the corner-weights within about 20 lbs using my corner-weight checker and did the alignment. At the end of the day yesterday I got it pretty square so I figured that I'd take it for a test-drive.

1) The idle is still too fast.
2) Instead of popping on over-run it now has an occasional sharp "BANG".
3) I didn't get the car's toe quite right since it still seemed to be crabbing slightly to the right.
4) The car was a little lower then I wanted, but I didn't want to re-index the T-bars again. Unfortunately I had almost run out of adjustment down on the RF T-bar and up on the LR. So I had just aligned it where the two ranges overlapped.
5) The good news is that with use the baukyness getting into 4th gear is going away.
6) Unfortunately 3rd gear is a little noisy while 4th gear is noisier then it was before. I think that I'll end up pulling the gearbox apart again next winter to replace the bearing cages under 3rd and 4th gear. I had chosen to skip this over the winter to see if the rest of the gearbox's rebuild would have made a difference. I guess not.
7) The gear spreads are just right with 5th gear being a comfortable highway cruiser at 4000 RPM and 3rd, and 4th evenly spread below it.

So I parked the car for the night.

This morning I went back and rechecked the ride height and found that the front had come up by 1/2" after driving. This is spite of jumping on the bumper and rolling the car backwards and forwards when doing the alignment. So I figured that I'd take the LR suspension apart again to reindex the T-bar and give me a little more adjustment and raise the car about 1/2". (I've got Elephant Racing's adjustable spring plates BTW). In taking the suspension apart I noticed that unfortunately a previous upgrade I had done appeared to be causing issues. I had replaced the shocks a few years ago with Boge's when I replaced the trailing arms with aluminum arms. Because my car is a '69, there is a subtle issue with the geometry on this upgrade where the left rear shock can rub on the heat exchanger near full droop. I thought that I had cut enough of the lower shock mount on the trailing arm to clear the issue -- but apparently not. It turns out that the heater box had worn a hole in the shock! I could look inside and see the shaft.

This is not good!

So I took a hammer to the heater box and bent the offending parts out of the way. After that I ended up reindexing the T-bar and putting the LR suspension back together. In another 5 minutes I had pulled the shocks out. So I've got overnight to figure out if I want to just replace the Boges or upgrade to Foxes.

Then I went to work on the injection system. After checking some information that Matt sent me I started to go through CMA. I eventually traced most of the fast idle issue down to the fact that the PO had mis-adjusted the linkages that connect the throttle cross-shaft to the throttle bodies. I noticed that even when the throttles were supposed to be closed, that they weren't resting on the throttle-stops. I could even fit a piece paper between the two. Aha! So after a quick adjustment to shorten those rods by a couple of turns, the idle dropped by at least another 100 RPM. I'm getting closer to 900! Unfortunately, without driving the car to warm it up adequately there isn't much more that I can do.

So I put the 911 back in the garage for the week and now it's time to order some more parts! Time to stimulate the economy!

[jpnovak]

John, Glad to hear you are back on the road.

I have a set of rear koni reds you can have. PM an address and I will get them out this week.

[jluetjen]

Thanks for the offer Jamie. I figure that I'll continue with my strategy of replacing parts on the car with race spec part when they wear-out or break. I'm leaning right now to springing for the Fox adjustables from Smart Racing. I've already sprung the bigger bucks for the Fox adjustables on the front.

Unfortunately Austin isn't my sales territory any more, so I don't get down there much.

One way or the other I'll have the car on the road next weekend.