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During various parts of this project, I've come up against the curse of old car restorers-parts! Yes, I know, Porsches are actually one of the easiest cars to find restoration parts for (if you happen to be restoring a pretty popular year and model, that is), but some parts are getting hard to find-and DAMN expensive. Some simply aren't available-anywhere, at any price. Take front control arm bushings, for example-easy to find for most 911/912's from '68 on up-but for the really early cars ('65-'67), like my '66, uh-uh. Nope. Nada. Nein. Nyet. This was a bit of a roadblock to it's restoration-the original rubber bushings had long since departed, and I couldn't get the car back on it's wheels until I had SOMETHING to use for bushings. After a few months of asking questions, doing a little research, crawling under a few cars, and making some measurements, I determined that I could use a set of bushings made for the control arms on the later cars-with a little work. So, I ordered a set of 4 (2 front, 2 rear) Weltmeister polyurethane 911 front control arm bushings from one of the big Porsche catalogs. When they arrived, I pulled the A-arms and crossmember down from the garage wall (remember those "mutant bats" I mentioned wayyyyyy back in page one?), and went to work measuring and fitting to see exactly what needed to be done. The rear bushings' O.D., at 2.0" (51mm) was a perfect fit into the rear steel crossmember-hey, that was easy. The I.D., though, was too small to fit over the control arm-so I took the bushings and one of the arms to a machine shop, where they carefully honed out the polyurethane bushings on a lathe to exactly 1.5" (38mm), which fit snugly (but not TOO snugly) over the control arms. Halfway done-now on to the front. The front bushings were too big-both the O.D. and the I.D. Hmmm-this took a little thought. After considering several choices, I ended up clamping the bushings in a vise (front to rear) and using 2 heavy-duty cut-off wheels chucked together in a Dremel to cut a slit in the bushings' side wall, all the way from end to end. This removed exactly 0.075" (2mm) from the circumfrence of the bushings, effectively shrinking both their inner AND outer diameters by the same amount. When clamped inside the front control arm bracket that bolts to the front suspension pan on the car, the slit in the bushing closed up to zero, and the control arms now fit perfectly inside the I.D. of the poly bushings. The new I.D. of the bushing ended up at 1.395" (35mm), and the O.D. at 1.985" (50mm). Success! When it came time to bolt the restored front suspension back onto the chassis, I ran into a slight problem-one that I caused by not following my own advice. Remember back a few pages when I cautioned against using air tools if you didn't have to? Well, I decided to thread all the new suspension bolts into the tapped holes in the suspension pan to make sure all the threads were clean before I actually torqued everything back together-I started all the bolts by hand, then thought it would be a great idea to use my new air ratchet to run them up all the way. 5 of the 6 went just fine-but the last one got about halfway in, then got real hard to turn. I stopped, reversed the ratchet, and tried to back the bolt out, but it wouldn't budge. I grabbed my 1/2 ratchet and strained-with little sucess-that bolt was STUCK. After exercising some of my more colorful vocabulary, I ended up using lots of heat from my propane torch, lots of Liquid Wrench, and easing the bolt back and forth in tiny increments, I finally removed it-but it was toast, as well as the threads in the pan. After drilling, tapping, and inserting a Helicoil, I was back in business-but I could have avoided all of this by simply threading the bolts all the way in by hand or with a small wrench-using the air ratchet was lazy and stupid of me-and it cost me. Lesson learned-(AGAIN!) What was so odd about the suspension installation was how quickly the actual bolting of the parts on went-after YEARS of having these parts laying around the garage, hours and hours of sandblasting, cleaning, painting, scouring catalogs and websites for parts and getting them to fit-actually bolting everything back on the car took about an hour. That's it. After I torqued the last bolt, I kept trying to remember what the next thing to do was-but there wasn't any next thing. I was done. Very odd feeling. With just a few little things to do, this project is almost to the rolling chassis stage-which means I'll be able to roll it out into the driveway for priming and wet sanding, now that the weather's warmed up. Whooo hoooo! |