The story of a silver -6, ...My '70 914-6 Options

[db9146]

The first 914 I had was a white '76 2.0L. I didn't know a lot about 914s back then (mid 80's) but I came to love that car, despite our ups and downs. Eventually I had to sell it and buy something more practical (I was buying a house and could only afford one car) but I remember reading an article in VW & Porsche magazine about a 914 conversion to a -6. That one was white as well and I started dreaming about one day having a -6.

Well, about a month ago, I was surfing another Porsche site that I don't visit much at all and just on a lark, typed in 914-6 just to see what would come up. To my surprise, I found a silver 1970 for sale near San Francisco. I finally reached the seller and started a conversation. I then reached out to the board here for a PPI and Matthepcat responded and very graciously offered to take a look for me. Well, things progressed with the seller and not wanting to let it get away, I made arrangement to skip the step 1 visual PPI that Matt offered to do and jump straight to step 2, a professional PPI with a compression check and the whole bit. A few more conversations and it was mine. There was money to wire and forms to FedEx back and forth but on my drive up to the Hershey swap meet a little over a week ago, it all came together. My wonderful wife was working out the transfer at the bank while I was driving up through Virginia. To cut to the chase, it got delivered yesterday.

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I know you guys especially can understand the excitement about this....I'm not bragging at all just very thankful that it has all worked out this way after dreaming about this for 30 years.

[db9146]

When I bought my -6, it had 130K miles and as far as I could tell in the documentation and from talking with the PO who had owned the car for the last 33 years, the engine had never been rebuilt. I have taken the car to a couple of local experts for a more thorough analysis than I have the knowledge to perform and came away with a number of pretty expensive items that would need to be addressed: carb rebuilds ($3K +), new heat exchangers, rebuild engine, etc.......and still wind up with a 2.0 gutless wonder (sounds great but no grunt).

So I know my approach might run against the grain with some but since it's my car...
I have started the process of dropping in:
- a rebuilt 2.7S with 9.5:1 forged pistons,
- individual throttle body F.I.,
- distributorless electronic ignition,
- a pair of Ben's 1 5/8" SS HEs,
- a Kennedy Engineering 228mm Stage 1 clutch package,
- a side-shifter trans, and
- Tangerine Racing's complete shift linkage kit with a JWest shifter

I've never taken on a project anywhere close to this magnitude so I'm sure that I will take more time than most to get it all done. I started pulling together the pieces of the project back in August, starting with the engine. Just for my own sake, I'm going to document the steps here because I'm sure that there will be suggestions of how to do things or other items to check that I will not think of and need you guys watching over my shoulder. Unfortunately, there are few teeners around these parts.

My adage just for those wondering, is to do no harm (make no modifications to the car that can't easily be addressed or returned to stock), make it look stock (and/or as period correct as possible), and clean and correct any issues I find as I move along through the project.

Starting with the engine....its a '74 911S that was completely gone through by someone who has done many of these with the correct machining, upgrading to 9.5:1 JE forged pistons and changing the S cams for E cams to make it a better engine for my tastes. I had the builder replace the CIS with ITBs and EFI, managed by a Megasquirt MS3 box with the expansion card. Next, we removed the distributor and replaced the ignition with an EDIS system tied into the trigger wheel and the MS3 ECU for control. He did enough wiring to get it running on his stand but I redid all of the wiring to clean it up and tie it into the factory -6 circuit board, per my adage. I'm going to be using some rainhats to top of the ITBs for now although I may move to a stock air cleaner assembly with a velocity stack on the front. I got a set of Ben's new 1 5/8" SS HE just this last week and have a surprise in the works for the rest of the exhaust.