Initial Discoveries

So I got the car home and muscled it (I mean REALLY MUSCLED) it off the trailer and into her spot in the garage. I knew when I picked up the car that the clutch pedal was stuck and it felt like the emergency brake was on [when it wasn't].

So I started by laying out the dozen boxes of parts I ferried home as well as various and assundry body panels and such. I had some really cool discoveries, the prev. owner did a lot of parts collecting and I now how have lots and lots of items I'd have spent thousands of dollars ordering myself. The bad side.....the more I catalog the longer the list of little missing items. I bought it with this understanding, so it's not a big shock.

I jacked her up and stripped off a set of polished 16x7 and 16x9 Fuchs with brand new Yokos. They had been refinished but sitting around outside untouched for a few years had left them pitted and dull. An hour or 2 on each wheel and they are almost back to where I want them.








Next off were the 4 calipers...which led to rotten soft brake lines...I found out over the next few days the Master Cylinder was toast, all the caliper pistons were frozen and the Pedal Cluster was ruined mess. It took me a night or 2 per caliper to rebuild them. In the process I ordered all new braided stainless lines, racing brake fluid, a new master cylinder. I used the time waiting on parts to clean up and repaint all 4 wheel wells too (amazing how much nicer a semi-forgotton spot of the car looks with years of grime and some fresh black paint).

I found out the hard way that I have a "late '75 911. This info came from ordering brake pads and bleeder valves that fit for the back, but not the front. This is good in that I have larger front brakes than expected, but bad because now I've got everything shiny and ready to go waiting on a replacement for the front pads to come in the mail.









In all this I started trying to rebuild said toasted pedal cluster. I spent 2 days trying to get it apart and then took the poor thing to a machine shop to get them to do it. Ultimately when even they couldn't get the $#%#^ thing apart I submitted to the idea that sometimes it's just better to get a replacement part. Thanks to the WWW that's a fairly easy thing to do these days. After all that effort the one I got in the mail a week later was a dream, only needing a good cleaning and some fresh paint, now back in the car working smooth and as Porsche intended.

So now I'm a month into to 911 ownership, I've bolted on and re-fitted a ton of small items interior and exterior. The car is purring (more like roaring :D ) fairly well in the garage on jack stands, but has a bit of a hard starting issue. I'm hoping/planning to get it moving on it's own out of the garage this week, planning a full tank of premium with some injector cleaner and maybe an "italian tune-up" before I go into full diagnosis mode on the engine. It's highly likely after sitting for 2-4 years there's gunk roaming around that needs to be blow out.

There's one more real obstacle to having a road bound car I need to tackle immediately. The lights, both front and rear were totally absent when I bought the car. I've gotten the rear's re-fitted and wired but the fronts I haven't tackled yet. There are blown fuses and I'm HOPING that rewiring and new fuses lights everything back up but I haven't seen that yet. Everything seems to work on the inside dash so I have high hopes this will be a fairly simple (compared to the brake system) fix, but it has to be done before I take Glenda (The good witch of the north) to the DMV to become an operating toy.

I have seemingly millions of little projects that I'll add to this blog but this post hopefully catches me up to today and gets me a jumping off point for future continued restoration and upgrading.