Lots of Progress

It's been a while since my last post.  Even though it was Spring Break and I figured I'd be spending every day out in the shop working on the car, this could not be further from the truth.  Many days I never even made it out there.  In the end I got two solid days where I could work on the car for multiple daylight hours.

But no matter I still got a lot done. My initial thinking was that I needed to take my time on this as I can't afford to buy anything for the car right now so what's the hurry.  However,  I found out I may be able to get the car media blasted for little or no cost (!!), so that has really lit a fire under me to get the car completely stripped down.

How bout some pics?
Here is the fuel tank laying on its side.  The expansion tank is laying next to it on the right (filler cap is lower left).  Gotta get that cleaned out.

I removed the exhaust as one assembly as there was no need to take it apart.  I was expecting it to be rusted to the bolts in the head but they were not bad.  I hit them with some PB B'laster (penetrating/lubricating catalyst - great stuff) and they turned right off.

It was also not as heavy as I expected.  In fact when taking out the last two bolts hanging the mounts to the rear of the transmission, I laid on the ground with my knees supporting the exhaust headers and just let it land on me to lower it to the ground in one piece:

Those tubes surrounding the headers are part of the "heat exchanger" system.  Basically it's a hollow collar that fits around the exhaust pipes and connects to a blower on the motor and some ductwork so that you can get hot air into the passenger compartment heated by the exhaust pipes!  Pretty cool.  Of course on this car, much of the heat exchanger is rusty and full of holes, and the blower wasn't even hooked up.  I will be getting stainless heat exchangers on the new exhaust...

With the exhaust system out of the way, I can really reach everything on the transmission now.  I removed the clutch cable, cable pulley, and speedometer cable.  The speedometer didn't work because the end of the cable where it attaches to the transmission was broken (as I suspected - pretty common I think).

Here is a shot of the passenger side of the transmission from the rear 3/4 of the car.

 Directly underneath the car now, this is the passenger side heads and oil filter hanging down.

The driver's side of the motor heads/cylinders.  Of course being a flat-4 the cylinders are horizontally opposed.  The gray bar at the bottom is the shifter rod headed all the way to the back of the transmission housing (tail shift).

 While I was under the car I took this comical shot of the repairs done to the trunk by one of the previous owners.  The curved rusty piece is a heat shield for the exhaust muffler, the shiny silver piece in the back is the new trunk floor sheet metal, and the gray bracket on the left appears to be a standard issue shelving bracket from the hardware store.

 Rear shot of the transmission, shifter, mounts, etc (drivetrain).  You can see everything really well now and access it all after the exhaust was removed.

Slightly closer shot of the motor transmission and right hand drive shaft/axle.

 

 In order to drop the motor and transmission from the car I need a couple of special tools, so I will wait another week or so to do that after I've gotten the proper tools.

Now onto some of the more complicated stuff - cleaning out the dashboard bits and wiring to prepare to remove the dash.  Here is the meatiest part of the wiring harness, just under the dash by the driver's left knee.  The knob on the upper left is the front hood release.  It's really not much as far as harnesses go - modern cars are ridiculous compared to this.

 However they are significantly more advanced too.  This is the backside of the fuse and relay panel.  The big round cylinders are relays (electrically operated switches).  The wires all terminate into a fuse block with some funky old-style fuses.  They make an aftermarket fuse panel for these that uses modern blade style fuses and I may end up using one of those.  I don't even know where to buy the funky fuses for this thing but it would be nicer to have standard fuses that I could get anywhere.

 Underneath the steering column are a few connectors that terminate here for things like the turn signal switches, headlight flashers, ignition etc.  These just pull straight out.  See the black tubes in the upper left of the pic?  These are actually hollow rubber tubes that connect the headlight washer lever on the steering column with the wiper fluid system!  I could not believe this...the tubes go through the firewall to the washer system in the front trunk.

 In the center of the car floorboard there are a couple of openings and access panels where you can get access to the wiring harness, fuel lines, speedometer cable and other lines headed rearward.

I removed the steering column so I could remove the gauges.  A few screws on the gauge panel and it pops out.  Unfortunately on these older cars you don't have a sealed gauge pod with a couple of connectors to the wiring harness like on modern cars.  Instead cables are terminated with blade connectors directly to the gauges.  In the case of the lights for the instruments the cables plug directly into a connector with the bulb housing.  These are kind of a pain to get out.  I documented everything not only in these pictures but also on paper so I could recable later.

 

The fuel/oil/warning lights gauge.  If you open this up you can actually replace a couple of the interior modules with other gauge bits from other Porsches.  Or replace the whole gauge with a different one that also shows oil pressure I believe.  More research needed on that one.  Those vertical columns on the back of the gauge are actually the bulb connector housings.

 Rear of the tachometer.

 Rear of the speedometer.  The cable sticking out of the left is the speedometer cable, the black cable on the right is the trip odometer reset cable.  It actually secures to the lower dashboard and you turn it to reset the trip odometer, instead of modern speedos where you push in on a button on the front of the gauge.

After the cabling was documented I removed all of the cables and bulbs from the gauges.  If you look closely you can see the bulbs hanging off of the ends of some of the cables.  The knobs on the dash from left to right are the headlights, hazard lights, and foglights.  To the right of the steering column hole is the cigarette lighter hole.

 Closeup of some bulb connectors and light bulbs from the gauges.

 What a mess it would appear.  It's (hopefully) not as bad as it looks.  What's even worse than removing a bunch of gauge wires and bulbs?  Removing heater cables for the cabin air blower!

The blower, along with the defroster valves in the front trunk area behind the fuel tank, is connected directly to the control module in the dash.  The cables that open valves in the system go through the firewall behind the dashboard and connect the dashboard levers directly to the blower/defroster housings!  Learning how to remove the control cables from the lever assembly was tougher than the gauges!  Here is the blower fan control assembly:

As you move the upper lever to the right to increase the blower speed, the metal fingers on the back side of the lever make contact with a different combination of ground+blower motor speed circuit, changing the blower fan speed.  It's very old-school cool to me how this is done.  This assembly had some cables and light bulbs which were fairly easy to remove.  Removing the cables was a pain though - you could tear up the dash trying to get all the stuff off of this thing.

Well, that's all of the car I have documented for the last couple of weeks.  I also removed the brake fluid reservoir and some brake line, some miscellaneous trim pieces and more but not very noticeable from pics.  Hopefully next weekend I can get the tools I need and drop the motor and transmission!

And now some bonus pics:  I found this rather large brown recluse dead in the shop while moving things around.  That puts you at ease huh?  I found one about this size in my closet too, you can see how big he is compared with a Shiner Bock bottle top...

And my other new toy...a 25HP 52" cut zero turn radius mowin' machine!  Woohoo, bring on the Spring!