Babalouie's 911 - start on p7

[itsnotagsr]

Love how anal and precise (eg new sticker) you are mate

Look forward to doing an Edo on you and buying this cheap afterwards!

[Babalouie]

So anyway, the gearshift is much, much better now. I was driving along, thinking that well, it'll never be an MX5 gearshift I suppose...when it suddenly occurred to me.

...hang on...don't I have this sponsorship by a high end oil company? Why, yes, yes I do :D


The gearbox oil is fresh, having been changed by Hamiltons when they did an annual service for me, after I bought the car. Not sure what brand they used (I'm sure it's very nice) but I've always had a good experience putting this stuff into my gearboxes.


It's Royal Purple MaxGear 75/90W, which is a fully synthetic gear oil that is compatible with LSDs, and the Hako runs it. I can't believe I didn't think of this before...it's not like I don't have bottles of the stuff lying around


The first step is to loosen the fill plug. It's always a good idea to loosen the fill plug first, that's because if you do the drain plug first, you might discover that the fill plug is in a weird spot, and something is in the way, so your spanner doesn't fit (or maybe it's just plain stuck...). If you end up in that predicament, you're basically screwed unless you can somehow turn the car upside down to fill the gearbox using the drain plug :D


The drain plug is at the bottom, and is the same 10mm allen bolt.


And out the old stuff comes. It's only a few thousand kms old, but looks a little on the black side. Hamiltons did say that the old oil they drained out was really very old, so maybe there's still some more of it inside?


You might be wondering what the catch is at this point....surely there is some sort of weird Porsche-911 thing where in order to put oil in the gearbox, you have to remove the front suspension first or something? Um...well no. Rather oddly, it's just like any other car in this respect

The plug on the right is the drain plug, which is magnetic. A little, but not too much metal hair stuck to it.


I used to have this nifty 500ml metal syringe for filling gearboxes and diffs, but it seems to have grown legs and disappeared, so I just used a length of normal 16mm plastic tube. 16mm is also handily the diameter of the fill hole, so it jams in there snugly and doesn't fall out. Also when the gearbox is full, you can see the oil seeping out of the fill hole along the clear tube, so that's your cue to rip the tube out and jam the fill plug in. The 911 transaxle takes 3.6L. And oh yes, it's also good practive when you do something like this, so cover the brakes with a sheet, because spilled oil and brake pads really don't get along.


So how does it go? Well, in the interest of full disclosure and unbiased consumer advice of course I have to point out that I am sponsored by Royal Purple :D But it really, really is slicker shifting now with the good oil in it. It's still kinda baulky on the 1-2 shift, but overall the gearshift has a more effortless, well oiled (boom-tish) feel to it.

Cross my heart/scout's honour

[adamRSLC]

What do you know babs , i start reading about white 964's and they appear everywhere!

PI 6 hour last week



also another white and red one !.

adam

[Babalouie]

^ that bloke has taste

[itsnotagsr]

Say g'day to EJ for me. He has mad Christmas parties.

[BigMuz]

That clutch pin is a debacle..

Imagine paying someone to look after one of these weird old cars :D

[VE Safari]

Bab's could supplement his income here...

[irsa76]

That clutch pin is a debacle..

Imagine paying someone to look after one of these weird old cars :D

Think about how much you would make though.
Mind you, dealing with some of the owners would be worse then the cars, VW and Mercedes owners were bad enough for me!

[BigMuz]

Nah- 'I have fixed the slightly sticky clutch pedal for you- that will be 9 hours @ $100 p/hr please.'

[irsa76]

Some of the customers I've dealt with that rate would have been some what more!

[Babalouie]

Nah- 'I have fixed the slightly sticky clutch pedal for you- that will be 9 hours @ $100 p/hr please.'

Going by the rather bizzarre welding repair on the old rollpin, I think what you just described is not that far out of the ballpark.

Thankfully it's a mechanically simple car to work on....access to everything (and the fact that they used 57 components where one would do) is the headfuck tho.

[[CatchMe]]

Some strong support for your orange indicators lenses here Bab's

http://bringatrailer.com/2011/08/12/...che-speedster/

[Babalouie]

Since some people made some disparaging comments about the state of my pedal rubbers, I made sure that some new ones were included in my latest order of parts from Design911. At five bucks each, I figure you can't go wrong.


The sunroof died a couple of weeks ago, so I ordered all the bits I should need to restore the mechanism. I reckon what's happened is that the cable on one side has snapped, but the little plastic hinges and sliders for the air deflector flap weren't expensive, so I ordered a set of those too. BTW the cables look interesting...they're like a felt rope, with a coil spring wound around it. A gear drives the cable forward and back like a long flexible steering rack.


But as usually is the case, you end up thinking that you should probab ly buy a few more things to justify the shipping costs, so I also plumped for this 100-cell high flow cat.


Which is quite a nice looking thing in polished stainless.


But first we have to get the old cat off...


German corrosion deserves a German penetrating fluid so I douse every nut and bolt in RostOff


And then I remove all of the heat shield panels around the cat, and loosen the O2 sensor, which came undone without too much heartache


Sadly this took rather longer than planned, because of these things. They're kinda like a speednut, but with a proper nut. As you can see, the bottom of the nut is square, and the bottom of the clip is square too, to hold the nut from turning when you undo the bolt.


It's actually quite a clever fastener which I've never seen before, however your admiration of them is only very short lived and soon after you think that they are the work of the devil, because this happens, the bolt jams on the nut and then the nut just starts turning.


So you have to grab it with something to stop the nut from turning, and there's not a lot of room with some of the fasteners to get a big pair of pliers in there. So it took about an hour to deal with all the stuck fasteners before the stock cat was on the bench.


You can see that the stock cat is actually in decent shape.


This is the outlet side...


The new cat has the same diameter necks (2.75 inches) but the cat itself has a much more open weave.


Porsche uses a slightly strange joiner from the cat to the rear muffler. Instead of a flange, the two pipes are flared, and this big olive thing goes in the middle, then is clamped over the top.


The gasket on the inlet side of the cat is a nice 3 layer copper thing, so that could be reused.


So I eagerly bolt up the new cat and...


Ah. It's too short. And as you can see the rear pipe is welded to a very solid bracket, which is then bolted to the engine.


...by the way, there is usually a huge, sausage shaped muffler behind the rear bumper, but in my car it's been turfed out and replaced by a popular mod called the "Cup Pipe" which is just a straight 2.75in pipe and is so named because that's what Porsche did on the 964 Supercup one make race cars. On the other side, the Cup Pipe goes into the stock final muffler.

In comparison, the stock cat goes right back in, and fits up perfectly.


I also replaced as many of those dodgy fasteners as I could with regular nuts and bolts, except in a few spots where it was impossible to get a spanner to hold the nut.


Well...I've sent an email to Design911 with pics and have asked for a refund for the cat, so we'll see what they say. They're usually pretty good to deal with.

But at least I have new pedal rubbers

[Q]

bend the dodgy aftermarket cup pipe slightly ??

[Q]

this sounds like the perfect time to re-install the 2nd muffler,
and do the 3rd muffler delete for a sound / power comparison........