The first thing I did was have a full cage installed in the car.  This work was done by Chris Schimmel at Competition Cages, in Hillsborough, NC.  See my post on that work here.

After I got the car back from Chris, I put it up on the lift and proceeded to pull the front and rear suspension, the torque tube, transaxle, and the gas tank.  My first job was to clean out the gas tank.  I had purchased a gas tank repair kit from POR-15.  This kit includes a cleaner, a rust neutralizer, and a sealant.  The full kit would be appropriate for a tank that had pinholes.  Upon inspection, my tank wasn’t that bad so I just used the cleaner, which will remove varnish and dried gas gunk.  Although my restoration side always wants to bead blast and repaint everything I touch, in this case the paint on the gas tank was in good shape and it is pretty well hidden from sight anyway.  After drying out the tank overnight with a hair dryer, I put it back into the car.  I had replaced the sump screen or “sock” last year.  After being cleaned off, it was still in good shape.

Normally the gas tank vents to the charcoal canister in the front of the car.  I had previously disposed of the canister and left the tube to it open to the air.  I had noticed at track events that a vacuum was forming in the tank.  There was a whoosh of inflowing air when I released the fuel cap.  I confirmed that the vent lines (there are 2 of them) were clear.  I used some hardware and fittings to tee the 2 vent lines into a single line.  I drilled a hole over top of the cap and put in a bulkhead fitting that connects to the vent hose.  So now the tank vents just above the gas cap.

I inspected the torque tube and transaxle.  Everything seemed to be in good shape.  I had to purchase a 17mm hex key socket (not a common item in my toolbox!) to get the fill and drain plugs out.  I refilled the transaxle with Mobil1 75/90W gear oil.  I evaluated the shift linkage.  I replaced the shift lever, the plastic bushing at its base, and the rubber O rings at the transaxle end.  I temporarily reattached the shift lever to the torque tube and confirmed that the linkage was working properly.

I pressure washed everything and painted the torque tube with rust converter paint that I purchased from Eastwood.  I then turned my attention to the torsion bar tube, trailing arms, and rear hubs.  First I dis-assembled everything and pressure washed the metal parts.  Since bead blasting aluminum parts gives such immediate satisfaction to the eye, I did so to the torsion tube chassis mount.  Everything else got a coat of Eastwood rust converter.  I then turned by attention to the rear hub bearings.  The directions on Clarks Garage  were sufficient to understand how to do the job.  You can probably do it with just a heavy vice, hammers, and punches.  It is easier with a press.  I had a bad moment when I realized that the bearing clearance was established with snap rings of various thicknesses.  Fortunately, nothing had changed since the factory did it and the same snap ring they had installed then gave me a satisfactory clearance.

Somewhere during this process, I decided to replace all of the rubber bushings with polyurethane ones.  I ordered most of the bushings I needed from Powerflex USA.  They didn’t offer the bushings for the torsion tube carrier, so I got those fabricated from delrin from Weltmeister via Paragon Products.    I believe that the poly or delrin bushings are legal for Spec944.  Full metal bushings are not.

Getting the trailing arm bushings out was difficult with hammers, chisels, and saws.  I had another bad moment when the new bushing appeared to be too big.  I finally discovered that the outer metal sleeve of the original bushing was still in place.  Once I got that out, the bushing fit fine.

The torsion tube carrier bushings (inner and outer) didn’t lend themselves to any obvious means of extraction.  I tried burning them off with a propane torch.  They just laughed at me!  The final solution was a tool in my arsenal that I fear and respect, that being my Mikita electric grinder with an 8″ wire wheel and no guard.  A true implement of mass destruction, this is the only tool that I have found effective for removing undercoating and certain types of paint.  I tackled these bushings, which fortunately are not encased in steel shells.  A blizzard of abraded rubber bits ensued, much like the clag that build up on the outside of corners at the track.  Eventually every bit of the bushings lay on the ground and the shaft was bare.  Victory!

It was time to re-assemble the torsion bars, carriers, trailing arms, and hubs.  But one job remained.  I welded a tab on the end of the torsion bars to enable their quick removal.  This and a matching hole in the fender allow me to remove the torsion bars in a matter of seconds.  I installed the bars and mounted some tires and lowered the car to the ground.  Not that I was trying for this look but I had a real lowrider!  I think the ground clearance was about 2″.  I lifted the car back up and reset each bar very easily.  This time the ride height was in the ball park.  Final setting of the ride height remains for after the engine and other significant weight components are added to the car.

In my next article I will write about checking the camber and toe characteristics of the rear suspension, as well as establishing a centerline for the suspension and subsequent alignment.

Interestingly enough, when I started up the cold 944 and drove it off the trailer, everything seemed fine.  The next weekend, I started it up and after it was warmed up a little the knocking noise appeared again at light throttle.  At that point, I decided it was time to start my winter R&R effort.

In one very long Saturday effort I had the engine pulled and torn down.  I found that the #2 rod bearing had definitely spun.  I had never seen a spun bearing before but it was pretty obvious. The “tangs” on the bearing shell that locate it were torn off and the bearing shell was worn down to a reduced thickness.  The journal on the crankshaft was also scored.

I also suspected that I had overheated the engine in my last session at VIR.  I checked the cylinder head with a precision straight edge.  I found it to be warped about 0.006″ at the #2 combustion chamber.  This may not sound like much but it is 3 times the Porsche allowable spec value.

My premise is that the head was warped at VIR, then when I got the engine up to temperature at CMP I had a head gasket breakdown that introduced water, combustion gases, and oil to each other in a very negative way!  I’ll never know for sure.

I did a little research and decided to trust my machine shop work to T-Hoff in Raleigh, NC.  I had 2 good used crankshafts so they are simply going to evaluate the best one and clean it up to put into service.  They are going to do a light skim cut on the head to get it flat.  They are going to put in new valve guides and do a 3 angle valve job.

In the meantime, I am going through the entire drivetrain and suspension.

A well known and respected fabricator of cages in my area is Chris Schimmel.  His fabrication business is Competition Cages, in Hillsborough, NC.

It turns out that Chris had installed the original rollbar.  He was more than happy to complete the job.  We decided to go with NASCAR door bars.  These basically bow outward into the door cavity, providing more side impact strength.  I also went with a bar across just under the dash, which is not required by SCCA or NASA but I felt it would keep me and the engine separate from each other, God forbid!

I am very pleased with Chris’ work. Now I need to apply some paint.

For my first event, I selected something low key.  I signed up for a 1 day event at Carolina Motorsports Park (CMP).  This event is sponsored by their in-house DE and solo track event organization, Turn One.  This event was on a Wednesday so I played hooky from work and spent the day checking my car out.  All went well.  I subsequently signed up for a Turn One event 10 days later.  This was a Saturday/Sunday event.  Again, all went well.  BTW, the Wednesday event was a great value as they only had 2 run groups so I got in six 1/2 hour sessions that day.  The weekend event was more like a traditional DE, with 4 run groups and four 1/2 sessions per day.  CMP is a great course.  Check it out if you can.

What I was really looking forward to was a Tar Heel Sports Car Club (THSCC) event at Virginia International Raceway (VIR) in early September.  This was a 3 day (Fri-Sat-Sun) event on the full course at VIR.  Although I have had my E-Type out on the North Course several times, this would be my first time on the full course.  I will note that the THSCC puts on a first rate DE event.

The event at VIR was just a whole lot of fun.  My instructor was great (he drove an early 911) and we really pushed me and the 944 as the weekend went on.  The 944′s neutral handling characteristics gave me great confidence.  The brakes were also outstanding.  Obviously, with a N/A car, the acceleration was not neck snapping but I am a beginner at this so I felt fine with the package I had as a learning tool.  BTW, I am running on Fuzion ZRi tires, 225 width at all 4 corners.  I think I mentioned before but the car weighed about 2350 pounds dry and front to rear weight split is almost exactly 50:50.  The springs and sway bars are very stock.

One nice thing about the VIR events is that a professional photographer comes and takes a zillion shots all weekend of all the cars.  You can buy just one photo or do what I did, which is buy a disk with every image they took that has your car in it. Following is a sample of some of my favorite shots.

So after many minutes of idling I decided the loss of oil pressure was for real.  I will note in all this time, I heard no strange noises.  No lifter clatter, no knocking, no ticking.  Just no pressure.

Swapping in a different pressure sending unit did not help.  I took off the oil filter.  It was dry.  Once upon a time, I had a car with a new oil filter with a blockage so I put on another filter.  No pressure.  Next I started the car briefly with the oil filter removed.  No oil.  I reviewed Rennlist forums extensively for ideas.  One idea was priming the oil pump by pouring oil down the filter bracket.  I did this multiple times, including spinning the engine by hand both forwards and backwards.  No improvement.  Some threads pointed toward the pressure relief valve as being a potential culprit. I took the small screwed cover off the valve and withdrew the spring and the valve plunger.  Everything seemed to be in order.  Although it is very hard to get to with the engine installed, I took off the oil/water heat exchanger.  I cranked the engine a little more.  No oil came gushing out.

Becoming desperate and very confused, I dropped the oil pan looking for issues like an oil pick-up tube that had come loose.  Everything looked shipshape.  I checked the torque on the crankshaft bolt.  No issues there.  I took the crankshaft bolt out and inspected the spacers that drive the oil pump.  Everything looked good. Eventually I took off the oil pump.  I set up a rig with a drill motor to bench test the pump.  It would suck and exhaust a stream of oil when spun by the drill motor.

At some point, I decided to use a Mighty Vac to draw a vacuum on the intake port to the oil pump, with the pickup tube screen setting in a pan of oil.  The first sign of a tangible problem was that I could not get oil to draw up into the tube. I didn’t know what kind of vacuum it took to prime the pump but a Mighty Vac will generate a pretty good suction.  I had made a temporary blanking plate to go over the oil pump inlet area on the block, with a fitting for a vacuum line.  I inspected everything carefully but could see no fault.

Up to this point all the work had been done with the car on a lift but with the engine in the car.  Due to all of the time spent with the engine at idle and no oil flow, I was pretty sure that the various bearings were now suspect.  I decided to pull the engine.

Once I had the engine out I put it on my engine stand.  I decided to remove the crank.  Of course the first step is to remove the crank girdle.  Finally, I found the proverbial smoking gun.  Remember that JB Weld job I did in the area where the balance shaft bearing had blown out? (Link to JB Weld article) I couldn’t believe my eyes but there were obvious signs of a leak path from the oil pump supply gallery back into the sump.  In effect, the pump was sucking air through this leak path rather than pulling oil through the pickup tube.  Even more exasperating was that the leak path was not through the JB Weld repair area but rather on the opposite side of the gallery, where my file had roughened up the contact surface of the block to the girdle.  It’s hard to see but here are some photos I took.

The evidence does not jump right out at you but in this and the following pics, there are 2 places in the space between the oil gallery and the sump where you can see evidence of oil seepage.

Some of you will surely wonder if I prepped and sealed this surface correctly.  I also wonder about this point. I followed the directions of the shop manual and used the required Locktite sealant.  It is hard to believe that this sealant was so sensitive to the file marks.  It does make some sort of sense that the failure could occur after several hours of running the engine.  But what a strange failure mode!

I was anxious to get on with life so I checked around and decided to buy a used engine from DC Auto, which is fortunately about  1 1/2 hours drive from my house.  They fixed me up with a used engine out of a 1984 944.

The used engine had leaks at the various timing and balance belt seals so I did a R&R on the belts and seals.  I also decided to put in a new set of rod bearings.  I put on my cleaned up oil pan with the sump baffle and my cleaned up cam tower.  So in effect, I installed a “short block” and put on all of my existing ancillary parts.  Being my 2nd engine effort in a few months, this effort went much faster due to my new found experience.  Once again, I struggled with getting the engine to mate with the torque tube shaft but finally everything was together and in good shape.

I had great trepidation as I fired this new engine up for the first time but there were no issues this time.  Except for noisy lifters, which I now understood to be normal.  The noise subsided in a short while.

So I was back on the road again, so to speak.  Not a very happy experience but an educational one.  I was thankful that the oil pressure problem occurred at home and not at some expensive track weekend.  I looked forward to getting the 944 on the track.

The following pictures are deceptively simple.  I had a bear of a time getting the engine seated correctly on the shaft from the torque tube.  Yes, I used a centering tool when I installed the clutch.  But it took forever to get the shaft to line up with the splines in the clutch plate and then even more time getting the shaft to engage the pilot bearing.  If anyone has some tips in this regard, please let me know.

A couple of comments:

The clear tube shown in the above picture is coming from a “steam vent” drilled and tapped at the back of the head.  This is allowed by 944Spec rules.  I bought the kit from Lindsey Racing.

The alternator as shown uses the stock bracket for the pivot mounting and a homemade tension adjustment piece.  I subsequently realized that I couldn’t use the stock air filter housing with the alternator mounted in this position.  I wound up buying a Porsche OEM A/C delete bracket, which mounts the alternator much lower and clears the stock air filter housing.  I bought the bracket from Paragon.

I can’t remember the specifics right now but something caused me to have to remove the oil filler assembly subsequently to get at something behind it.

Obviously, the above photos were taken before I got the car painted!  After I got the engine into position, much time was spent getting the wiring hooked up and getting everything in the engine compartment shipshape.  But eventually, I reached the point where the engine was ready to fire up.  So with some trepidation, I gave it the juice.

First I established that it would crank, with the fuel injection disabled.  Next I pulled the fuel injection rail and confirmed that I was spraying fuel from all of the injectors.  They were firing OK.

So finally I attempted to start the car.  To make a long story short, the engine would fire, idle badly, then die.  I spent a long day checking all sorts of possibilities, with no luck. I went to bed on a Sunday night very dis-spirited.  I have a hard time sleeping when there is a problem that needs solving.  I remember getting out of bed at 4 am, going out to my parts car, pulling the ECU, and switching it into the car.  It fired immediately and ran smoothly!  Wow!  Oil pressure was good, although there was a horrible racket from the lifters, which went away eventually.  I went to work that morning in a much better mood.  Reconstructing, I remembered that the previous owner had given me an extra ECU with the car.  I had somehow installed that one and it turned out to be bad.  Oh well, all’s well that ends well.

The next weekend I did another once over on the car and identified a number of small issues to be dealt with, mostly loose bolts in the suspension, etc.  I did a rough alignment.  On Sunday, I took the car out for its first test drive.  I drove it about 1/2 hour with no problems.

The next weekend, I took the car out for a more vigorous test drive, on my local backroad test track.  This consisted of an hour of heavy acceleration and braking, combined with much weaving back and forth, trying to stress the car relatively close to the house, rather than at the track.  The car did fine.  I parked it for the week as it was back to work.

The following weekend I went out planning to make another endurance run of a few hours.  I started the car.  WTF, no oil pressure!  Being in denial, I let it idle for a few minutes waiting for pressure to build, then thinking it must be a bad sending unit.  Note that the car has both a gauge and an idiot light.  Both are driven off a common sending unit.  I grabbed a spare sending unit off my parts car and tried it no luck.  At this point, the car probably had a total of 10 to 15 minutes of idling.  Very discouraged I decided to shut it done and mull the situation over.

Too be continued-

As I have pointed out in previous posts, I did not upholster my seats.  Indeed, I did take a swing at it but was frustrated at the results.  Since I was working in central California at the time, I dropped everything off at XKs Unlimited, where they did a very nice job of it.  That said, there are folks you are interested in trying to upholster their seats. My seats were taken from a Series 3 car, which gives you the ability to recline the seat back and a headrest.  Following are a series of photographs that I received from BAS that illustrate some of the highlights of the process.  As with any upholstery work, the devil is in the details. In particular, any flaw in the foam padding under the seat coverings tends to telegraph and show up as a pucker or misfit of the material.  So although it doesn’t really show in the attached photos, forming your foam just right is very important.  Of course, the following assumes that the covers are pre-sewn to a high standard, which my BAS covers were.  So here goes.

You can purchase new rubber diaphragms to stretch across the bottom of the seat frame

This shows the glue pattern on the foam and the mating upholstery for the seat bottom. Since the seat bottom is in a shallow depression, the glue serves to hold it down. This can also be done with some strategically placed heavy threads tied to the diaphragm.

1

Then you get to pull the skirt taught and staple it to the wood tack strips strategically placed around the base of the seat frame.

That was easy, right?  Now we can move on to the backrest.

Here is a shot of the seat back, with the rubber suspension and part of the foam padding installed. You can buy new suspension.

Here is the seat back with the foam completely installed.

Here is a neat little trick. You put a plastic bag over the foam, since normally the foam grabs terribly at the upholstery fabric. Once you get everything in position, you can tear the bag and pull it out. As far as I can tell, there is no gluing involved for the seat back.

You are going to eventually staple the bottom edge down securely but first you attach it provisionally, attach the seat back to the seat bottom, and check for alignment of the seams.

After all of the above work, applying upholstery to the headrest is a quick job.

Attach all the hardware and you are done!

I had used KoolMat brand heat insulation material successfully before on my Jaguar E-Type and decided to try it again on the Porsche.   I found KoolMat to be a very well engineered product for heat insulation.  It is also pretty easy to install.  Click on this link for the article on the installation of KoolMat in my E-Type.

So I proceeded to do a rough take-out on how much KoolMat material I would need and proceeded with the installation.  The material can be cut easily with heavy scissors.  It can be glued down with contact cement.  I have used both the aerosol type and the brush on type.  The brush on type is much cheaper.  Seams at the edge of the individual pieces are sealed with silicone caulk.  The end result was a dramatic drop in cockpit temperatures!

Following are some pictures of the installation:

Here is the passenger side footwell, which was showing the highest temperatures, due to the exhaust header on the other side.

I use this heavy red paper, which is sold at building supply stores like Home Depot , to make patterns.

This is the most important piece, as this surface was the hottest.

The KoolMat conforms to single curves with no problems. With compound curves you may have to cut some slits.

Here is the drivers side

Here, the gaps are sealed with black silicone caulk. The metal line is for the fire system. The black cable is the wiring to the rear of the car.

Another shot showing the seams sealed with silicone

Many of the items jettisoned to reduce the weight of car were fed by the electrical system of the car.  There is a truly massive harness that goes from the engine compartment to the passenger compartment.  As I stripped out the car, I literally cut this harness out with a metal grinding disk.  I vowed to go back with a minimalist custom wiring system.

The following systems are still required for the track car:

• Battery/alternator/starter
• Fuel injection/fuel pump/fuel pump relay
• Ignition system
• DME unit
• Emergency battery cutoff switch
• Radiator fans
• Heater fan
• Headlights/taillights – who knows, I may need to go night racing
• Windshield wipers
• Brake lights
• Instruments – tach/oil pressure/water temp/fuel gauge

A couple of comments-

• I decided to keep the fuel pump relay as stock as possible.  I kind of like the idea of the fuel pump turning off in the case of an accident.
• Emergency battery cuttoff switch – same thing.  I like to be able to shut down the electrical system in the event of an accident.  It’s also required by NASA, PCA, SCCA, etc.
• Heater fan – I wanted to be able to blow some air on the windshield for defrost purposes, although without A/C, it’s not as effective.
• Wipers – for those fun, wet track days
• I ran dedicated ground wires for all circuits, as much as possible.

So with this in mind, I started with a control panel that I bought from Summit.  I dedicated its available toggle switches to Master on/off, Fuel Pump, Radiator Fan, Lights, Defrost Fan.  Plus it has a push to start switch.

The center of my custom dash held the switch panel.   Behind it I mounted relays.  I found out later that the load from all of the above through the fuse for the master on/off switch would blow a 40 amp fuse.  Not wanting to go any bigger on the fuse, I had to install additional relays for the radiator fan and the headlights in the engine compartment and feed them directly from the alternator.

As I said, I wanted to maintain the DME/fuel pump relay.  Actually, with the exception of adding a toggle switch for the fuel pump, I wired the DME/fuel pump relay exactly stock.

One area that gave me quite a bit of puzzlement was where to mount the emergency battery disconnect switch.  The sanctioning bodies like this to be external to the car so the corner workers can get to it.  I liked the idea of having it within my reach.  I decided to put it on the extreme left hand side of my custom dash, right next to the pull for my fire suppression system.  I can reach it from there and a corner worker can reach in the open window to get to it also.  I may ultimately have to mount a wire pull to the outside of the car to be legal.

I buy all my wiring connectors, mainly 1/4″ flat spade connectors, from NAPA.  Their quality seems to be a pretty good compromise between the really cheap junk and high end stuff.  I solder all my connections and the encase them in shrink wrap.  The shrink wrap is to keep the natural vibration of the cable from stressing the stranded wire just beyond the solder joint.  It also provides a much neater looking installation.  I bought an assortment of loop type wire ties (that attach with sheet metal screws) which I used copiously as well as standard wire ties.

I used the stock tach, oil pressure, water temp, and fuel gauges.  They are basically wired stock.  I re-used the stock stalk for the wiper but I isolated the single circuit that caused the wipers to run at their fast speed and only wired that one circuit.  I cut the stalk off short to avoid hitting it during the heat of the action.

I must be old fashioned.  I hate plastic corrugated wire loom.  I prefer to wrap my harnesses in black cloth friction tape.  I did break down and buy a “kevlar look” woven wire loom from Summit to run my harness from the dashboard back to the rear hatch area, for the fuel pump, fuel gauge, brake lights, etc.

Wiring the car took multiple weekends of work.  It is not a trivial effort.  But it is very important to reduce the wiring to a minimum for weight saving and to do it correctly for reliability.

Single stage urethane is what it sounds like.  It is applied in one step.  This is versus the process where you apply the color as a matte finish basecoat and then cover it with clearcoat, which adds the gloss.  The paint is mixed with a catalyst and a reducer.  My paint cost was around $250.

The following work took 3 days.  For reference, my E-Type probably took 3 months.  Like I said, this was not going to be a fancy paint job!

First I evaluated the car as to what to remove.  I took off the bumpers and front air dam.  I took off the hood to paint it separately.  I took off all of the trim.  I took out the door glass and the rear quarter windows.  I left the windshield installed. I took off things like door handles and light assemblies.  Then I gave the car a good wash with Dawn detergent.  Then I wet sanded it with 400 grit.  Here is how it looked.The above work took up the first day.  The next day, I pulled the car into my paint booth and began masking.  Believe it or not, it takes a full day to mask a car.  It is unbelievable how long a good masking job takes.  The following pictures do not do justice to the effort!

The third day, I was ready for paint.  This is really the easiest part.  As with any paint job, the hard job is with the prep.  Bear in mind, I made no attempt to fix any issues with the body work, with the exception of one major rust bubble on the hood and welding in a plate to fill in where the radio antenna had been.  That said, the car was rust free elsewhere.

So I laid on 3 coats of orange paint.  I don’t have any photos of it but I laid the hood out on sawhorses and spent some major time getting the crumbling foam insulation off the inside.  I then painted the inside of the hood white.  After it had dried I flipped it over and painted the outside with 3 coats of orange.

As the orange paint was drying, I turned my attention to the bumpers and air dam.  I cleaned these up the same way I did the rest of the car.  I then painted them with some inexpensive “rattle can” paint from Autozone suitable for plastic and rubber parts.  This paint went on very easily and as we will see, looked great.  Finally, I came back and carefully masked for my number circles.  The rough outline of the circle can be done with regular tape and masking paper.  The final taping is done with a very thin vinyl tape, about 1/8″ wide, which can be pulled into a curve.

The next weekend, I spent a day putting the various parts back on.  Here is my “gallery” of how it looks.  You can’t see the runs,the captured bugs, and the other blems but believe me they’re there.  But from 20 feet, no problem!  The paint job is a major improvement, to say the least.