I've spent a couple of hours every now and again when I can and also managed a few weekends too. The to do list now is just a few things, the main thing being to fit the engine. Once running well enough I should be able to take my first ride! Hopefully that's just a few weeks away now.

Last week the painter delivered the bonnet hood and boot trunk lids and helped me put them straight on the car. Still a little bit of adjusting to go but not far off now.

I spent the last couple of evenings finishing off and bleeding the brakes. Unfortunately one of the rear calipers is no good. Typical as it's the only thing I've not touched on the car as they were refurbished only a few years ago. As I plan a full brake upgrade in the future I was reluctant to spend out on them again.

So with the brakes and handbrake functional it was time to get the car back on the ground. The first time in two and a half years!













The amount of random visits to the garage is now rather high

Your car looks beautiful. We are close to the same place in our builds. I am hoping to have the engine in in the next 2 weeks too.

We so know how to do it in good old England

I can just sit and stare at Stephens car.
Just so tasteful.

Your car is outrageously DEFIANT.

What size tires did you end up using? Wheels are 15s? 16s?

For anyone who thinks 914s are ugly, I'd like to see them look at Stephen's car and say it with a straight face.

Wow. Just WOW!

Charlie

Can't wait to see the big grin on your face when you drive it! Man, that sure looks good!
I know what it is like not to have the time to work on it as much as you want.
Great pics too

with everything that's being said! What a wonderful result.
You did a FABULOUS job and have to be very proud. Well done, very well done.

Thanks Dion. There's a chair in the garage, I've been caught by my wife several times times just looking at the car. She says I love it more than her. I know not to argue with her



Thanks Lawrence. The tires are 205/55 front and 225/50 rear. They're 16x7 front and 16x8 rear.

Thanks Jim, that day if very close now and that grin will be from ear to ear!

Thank you sir. I have to admit when I first started I was a little daunted and the project involved much more than I ever anticipated. I am immensely proud, without getting too heavy I only wish my father could have seen what I achieved and saw that he taught me well and that I did listen

The last job that I wasn't looking forward to is now complete. With the amount of repairs to the windscreen aperture I was always a bit worried that the anodised trim wouldn't fit.
It wasn't exactly the easiest job to fit but I'm so pleased it's now done.

Amazing build . Lots of inspiration and ideas for my own project!!

A very busy summer working meant I didn't get as much done as I'd have liked. I did however spend time finishing off a few bits and revisiting a few others. Not much really worth photographing hence the thread being rather quiet.

My original fuel tank wasn't in the best condition and I decided to replace it with one of the new Dansk reproductions. I'd already fitted one to 23eHeure's car and knew they looked and fitted well. Unfortunately the paint on mine replacement didn't even come close to being acceptable so I decided to give it a fresh coat of satin black.

Looks like it was painted with no preparation and with surface rust.





So I started to rub it down for fresh paint. At one point I turned around to grab some more sandpaper and behind me heard the tank falling off the table on to the floor :shock:





Great, new tank not looked worse that the old one!

There was no way of banging out the dents so the only choice was to fill them.



After lots of sanding and painting the end result was just about perfect.



Whilst fitting the tank I completed the fuel system...

Finishing off the interior...

I bought new door panels a couple of years ago with a big bundle of parts. I won't go into details here but I had a few issues with them and had to completely strip them down. modify and recover them. That was quite a frustrating weekend but the end result was worth it.



The last piece to finish off the interior was the back pad. It had been sitting in the loft was some time now and looked a lot worse than when I put it there



Under all that dirt I knew it was salvageable.

The main area of concern were the bottom corners, they had both suffered water damage. In fact one of the corners was missing.

Not exactly pretty.





For the missing corner I replaced it with cardboard and then fiberglassed over it for strength.



Typically when you're dealing with fibreglass you tend not to pick up anything like your camera as it'll stick to you fingers so I didn't manage any progress shots. But here's how it turned out.



Before I put it in the car I finished off the firewall access panel. This will probably come out again whilst the engine is installed.








Interior complete!

The next update, hopefully coming very soon will be a big one.

Engine install!

So good to see you back at it. Could it have been due to my prodding?
Interior looks fantastic or should I say perrrrfect!
Too bad about the tank. Happens to the best of us.

Stunning .

May have helped Jim

After a couple of hours fighting with the rear trunk torsion bars it was time to start the engine install. To be honest I didn't really have the time and the plan was to get the engine as far in as I could ready to lift up and bolt in.

However I only got this far when I realised I wasn't going to be able to lift the car high enough for the driveshafts to clear the carbs. So tomorrow, with a bit more time I'll drag it back out and remove the carbs and try again.

Oh boy! Getting close!

I don't want to make anyone feel bad, but I think yours may be the most beautiful 914 ... Porsche... CAR ever!

I'm with Brent....your car is absolutely gorgeous. Be patient. It will be finished before you know it Mate!

Thanks a lot guys.

It took a bit of persuasion but it's in! Not the easiest to do alone with a couple of trolley jacks but like everything else I had to give it a go.

I went with removing the driveshafts in the end, I hadn't torqued up the hub nuts yet so removal took just a few minutes.

Nice! Great to see this step.

Big accomplishment right there.

If you remove the lower shock bolts on the trailing arms and then prop up the arms, the driveshafts go in easy.

Thanks, I did just that and they're now back in again.

I spent this afternoon getting everything connected but am struggling with the throttle cable. I just don't have enough adjustment to tighten the cable, it just seems to long. I'm beginning to think the engine could do with moving back a bit. There's about an inch of adjustability at the mount so I'm hoping that will do it.

Nice work Stephen,my new cable was too long ,cut off 12mm + @ pedal end,think I adjusted the rest out at the rear linkages .
You are SO close .
Startup day for me was something I will never forget ,motor coughed ,farted then blew out heaps of crap then settled to a reasonable idle....priceless.

Nice one Stephen, that certainly looks like it belongs in there.

Thanks chaps.

There's certainly enough thread either end of the throttle cable to nip a bit off. So with a slight engine shift combined it should turn out ok.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTNN_2MGxq8


It works!

After a full day yesterday buttoning up and double checking everything all that was left to do this morning was to add oil and fuel.

Once I knew I had oil pressure I was good to go. It took a while to get going but after it fired it settled to a nice idle as I ran around checking for leaks. Seems there's an oil leak on one of the cam covers that needs addressing but other than that all seems good so far.

I'm ecstatic! :cheers:

Rock on Stephen! Prepare thineself for miles of smiles!! Great job on the car.

Great news Stephen, a fantastic milestone !

What a great sound in a 914. Congrats mate. Long road, well worth the effort.
Enjoy! Happy motoring and all that!

Well it hasn't moved far under its own power yet. :cry:

To start with I had a lot of trouble setting up the throttle linkage. At this point I've got around it with a makeshift solution, that to be honest works perfectly, but it's far from the factory setup so that's something I'll revisit at a later stage.

With the engine in the last piece I needed to fabricate was a new rear shift rod. I got lucky a few month ago and swapped a part for tailshift straight rod. Along with my original 4-cylinder bent rod I set about cutting them up and making a compatible straight rod that wouldn't fail the block and heat exchangers.

Original 4-cylinder bent sideshift rod top, early tailshift rear rod bottom.


I won't document the process as it's been done many times before and partly because I forgot to take any photos

Here's the finished article.


With the rod completed it should have just been a case adjusting the shifter and go out for a test drive. Sadly it didn't end up that way and after hours of trying to find all the gears I came to the conclusion that I need to adjust the clutch more. However that wasn't going to happen as there was no adjustment left.

So it's time to add a washer under the pivot ball of the clutch arm. Hopefully a simple fix, but it obviously means removing the gearbox.

This is where I am now as of this morning. I managed to rip both cv gaskets so I need to pick up a couple before I get it all back together which should hopefully be later next week.

That's not a tiny gearbox, it's just a stupidly larger jack!



Still have my fingers crossed a can get a few shakedown miles done this year as well as a rolling road tuning session.

wow

Stephen,
You are not alone. I had to remove my gearbox after the install too! My removal was because the ring gear had to be flipped.
I was fortunate enough to have been told about the washer under the pivot ball early on.

It is all worth it in the end. Buy extra sets of CV gaskets they are cheap.

You are almost there!

Thanks for sharing and congrats on hanging in there...

Thanks chaps.

I can't believe that after a few hours of searching I can't find any CV gaskets in the UK. I even called Porsche

Closest I found was France but I didn't fancy spending $20 for shipping for a few gaskets. In the end I popped into my local motor spares shop and bought some gasket paper and carefully cut out my own.

Hoping to get the gearbox back in tomorrow with the help of a friend.

Another month of tinkering and I'm no further sadly. In fact right now I'm further away than I've been in a while.

So far I've managed about 40 miles in the car and none of them have been very enjoyable. Getting the engine to start initially wasn't too difficult but since then it continued to run worse and worse and starting got more and more difficult to the point where it wouldn't start.

The first thing I changed out was the starter motor. I was using my original 0.7Kw unit from the four cylinder and as you can imagine it struggled. I swapped that out for a 2.0Kw High Torque unit and that was a huge help. But each time I went for a quick drive the engine performed different to the previous drive.

I knew the timing was correct, or at least close enough, tappets were perfect and the spark was good, so that just really left fuel.

Last night I pulled the tops of the carbs off and on one bank one of the pump jets was blocked and the other bank two were blocked!

This afternoon I did this...



As you can see they're a bit dirty.



I guess sitting in a box for three years with remnants of fuel in hasn't done them any favours.

On the bright side I get to learn how to clean a rebuild a set of PMO's

If anyone's got an good sources of information on how to do this please let me know.

So I stripped down the carbs and gave them a thorough clean. One litre of carb cleaner later and a few replacement gaskets they look much better and hopefully will perform as good as they look.

Taking the carbs off it was plain to see I didn't do the best job in repainting the engine shroud. It had seen a lot of abuse over the years and seen a lot of paint. To be honest I just didn't use the right paint. So whilst I had the opportunity I thought it best to replace it. After failing to get a reply from a couple of vendors and not being able to find a suitable secondhand replacement I thought I'd see what I could do to breathe some life into what I had.

Here you can see the paint bubbling and peeling off.



So it was introduced to a can of paint stripper. The top coat of black paint shrivelling away in seconds revealing the next layer of paint and also under that what looks like a layer of white.



And under the white another layer of red!



And finally under that the green shroud.



At this stage I ran out of paint stripper but I was close so the rest was sanded off.



The shroud looked rather tired, the usual marks from the HT leads worn in and I wondered if I'd simply be able to sand them all out.

So slowly through different grades of sandpaper it started to come back to life.





And then I concentrated on a patch to make sure I wasn't wasting my time. Sanding up to 2000 grit and then compound polish. It was only at this stage I thought I was on to something.



Lots of effort later.



I know it's not the right colour for the engine or the car even but I'm quite fond of it and for once it only cost me my time so I'm happy with that.



Hopefully I get it running again tomorrow.

Shroud looks great! Even the color. Why not green? I like it.

I went through the same process with paint stripper on my red shroud and almost lost it as the FG did not take too kindly to the stripper, looked good in the end, but that's another story for another time.

Look forward to hearing driving stories and VIDEO!

That looks REALLY good! Another great job by you.

Thanks Jim. Black would have been my first choice and then red simply as they're the colours the 3.0 SC had at the time. However as a colour I do like the green and now it's in the engine bay I like it even more.

Sadly any driving will be very limited now due to the weather here in the UK and mainly because of the damn salt on the roads! Hopefully I can grab a few miles here and there as the weather permits. Oh for some Californian sunshine!!!

Porsche guys will just think you've got an E engine in there

Love it!
Amazing how much time these projects take. But just think if you were paying someone else to do it!!!

Hi Stephen,

Wow that is exactly the threat I was looking for quite a while. You have the some ideas and issues you handled quote well.

I'm located near Stuttgart and have the same kind of project sitting in my garage to get started with.

If you are close to Zuffenhausen, feel free to get in contact with me. I would love to share our experience on the 914's.

Cool things you have done to your car.

It's been a frustrating few months trying to get the engine running well. I've tried everything I know and more after hours of searching online. So after taking a break for a while to save my sanity, I did the right thing and got someone a damn sight more knowledgeable than me to get it sorted.

Today, in glorious sunshine, it left again on the back of a trailer. All I can do now is hope it's nothing too serious.

Gah! That really sucks and hopefully it isn't anything bad.