Been a 914 fan since, well, since you could buy one new... Finally got one.

It's in Like New shape! Except for the rust I found, and the rust I haven't found, and the engine fire, and the half-repaired wiring, and the barbequeued top, and the barbequeued seats, and the missing parts, and the carbed mystery motor, and the body damage, and the PO's hellhole fix, it could have just driven off the showroom floor!

After the mandatory couple of weeks of futzing around, sitting in it and making engine noises, I actually picked something and got started... I stripped the trim and roasted vinyl off the roll bar and started cleaning up the burned paint.

Yes, I thought mine was in a lot better shape than it actually was also ...... however after a few years of taking it apart and addressing the 'issues' at a snails pace .... I am hoping to begin reassembly in a couple months ...... but since it has been so many years since I took it apart ..... I have forgotten where most everything goes .....


BTW

There's a dent in the middle of the drivers-side sail, and I started monkeying with that.

Welcome to the madness. Glad to see you have a good sense of humor!

You are wonderfully delusional... It does look like new!

"delusional" - yeah, I'd have to cop to that.

I'm not much of a candidate buyer for a new car because they don't come with those features I listed in the first post. How the heck are you supposed to forge a link with a car if you can just, you know, drive it?

You'll do just fine here...

Made some progress on the floorboards. Stripped out the "Asphalt Alptraum" stuff and found the floorboards underneath aren't as rusty as I was afraid they might be...

To lift the asphalt stuff, I thought about using dry ice, or about using heat - then just went out on a cold day and lit into the stuff with a putty knife. Some of it came up in hand-sized sheets, some had to be hammered out in tiny shards, and some is still there waiting for my wire wheel, but most of it came out.

Yes that's the driver's rocker carpet still there, still trapped by the handbrake lever. I got the lever off its pivot but haven't yet gotten the cable out of the lever, and I'm not yet to the point of slicing the carpet to free it.

Some rust, no holes that I found so far. Current plan is to use a wire cup on an angle grinder to rip the rest of the asphalt and seam-sealer out, and to get as much of the surface rust off as possible. Then, douse it with phosphoric acid to eat the rest of the rust, and apply a flexible sealer/insulator goop.

What's Standard Operating Proceedure - do I remove the seat hinge brackets before treating the rust? Do I remove the seat crossmember thing?

Here you can see the remains of the roasted asphalt along the rear edge of the floor.

What about the trans tunnel - there's a fair amount of rust inside there. I'll search, but what's your opinion: Just dump phosphoric acid in there and let it simmer, then suck it out? Open up the trans tunnel by slicing a "hatch" in the top? Remove the trans hump completely by cutting the spot-welds? What would you do about the rust inside the tunnel?

Ah, it looks like my brutha. Welcome and good luck!

Got the rest of the asphalt stuff out, and got the pedal board up. The pedal cluster and surrounding area has rust, but not the biblical mess that I expected.

And today I finally got a chance to make some progress...
I wasn't sure whether it'd be necessary to pull up the seat hinge brackets to work the rust underneath them, but I finally decided better safe than sorry. Turns out there's a technique to using a spot weld cutter; I holed the drivers floor in a couple of places before I figured it out. But, I got the brackets off, along with the misc tabs and handbrake 'tunnel', then used a cup wheel to knock the rust off the firewall and rear area of the passenger floorboard.

In case you're in the same quandary, in this pic the passenger floorboard is on top, and you can see the red rectangular rust patches underneath where the hinge brackets were on the drivers side - the rust has already been brushed off the pass side.
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I think the strategy going forward will be to finish one section - get the rust brushed off, treat it with a phosphoric acid product to kill any remaining rust, seal the seams with some suitable product, paint, then cover with a sound deadener.
Then move on to the next section - trying to feel like I'm making progress, and I don't want the fresh sections to rust while I wait for my next chance to work.
Guess I'll be placing a nice Eastwood order pretty quick.

Good job. Looks like a real nice car.

John

Thanks John! It's making me happy so far.

Ahh, the joys of January and February in the Rockies - too flarkin' cold to do much with my car. I did get some time to get into the passenger door and window, and got suprises both pleasant and otherwise.

The pleasant suprise was that the door was not a ball of rust - actually in really good shape.

Here's a view down inside the door,


and a view up at the underside of the door:

... yeah so those weren't the most awesome pictures. Anyway, I was happy that the door was rust-free.

The passenger side glass was broken, but the car came with a spare - I thought. Turns out the spare is an "early" window, won't fit my '75. (I'll skip the boring picture of an early side window.) Guess I'll be sourcing a late passenger side window glass.

Looks to be a nice tub, so far.

Thanks - most of the discoveries have been happy ones so far!

So I've got a lot of "life" happening right now, and the garage was pretty cold this weekend, but I did manage to get a little "Porsche time" in. The seat brackets and handbrake cable tunnel had been previously removed and the rust underneath them brushed off; I painted them with SEM Brush-On Weld-Through Primer, and slathered the same stuff on the floorboards underneath the brackets. Hopefully now the area underneath those brackets won't rust till I'm dead and gone.

Here's the weld-through primer I used: SEM Brushable Weld-thru Primer,#39786, bought from Summit Racing for like twelve bucks.

It's worth noting that I went through two cans of SEM's aerosol spray weld-thru primer and both were clogged right off the shelf - it wasn't the nozzle, they were clogged down in the dip tube, so were completely unusable... Dunno if they sat on O'Reilly's shelf too long of what; the stuff seems to have a very high solids content, so maybe an aerosol can isn't the best idea for that. After those failures I figured the brush-on was the way to go.

I'll post more when I've had a chance to weld on them, and see how that goes.

Holy crap - it hasn't really been 8 months since I worked on my Porsche, I just got reallly lackadaisical with updates... I'll upload some pictures and post an update toot sweet!

Firewall and rear window area de-rusted and painted:

Dent in the sail: I tack-welded bolts into the depth of the dent,


... and used a prybar to lift the dent out slightly. Still to do: Bondo and paint.

And, got the fire-ravaged old wiring out, getting ready for a new harness:


Lots of other little jobs too, like I replaced the broken passenger side window.

Current jobs are new wiring harness install, replacing fuel pump and fuel lines while I'm in there, finishing repairing that dent in the sail, and replacing the rear windshield. Sorry for the long delay between updates!

Looks great! Nice to see fresh Laguna Blue paint. I need to get some of that.