Quote from: Worms on April 20, 2023, 07:32:49 AM
I'm loving this thread. Wish there was a like button 

Don't the cool kids this day reply with "F" or Thumbs up emojis 

This is looking grouse, Nice to see the time and effort being put in.

Quote from: ranton-inc on April 20, 2023, 08:01:07 AM
Don't the cool kids this day reply with "F" or Thumbs up emojis 

I wouldn't know, would I? 

I've been using Pro Coat locally for all of the powder coating on this car and recently sent them the rear brake calipers that I'd completely stripped of everything. Factory colour is black but thought yellow would look better and tie in with the yellow seat belts and other yellow accents the interior will get.
Now, technically yellow calipers on Porsche at least signifies carbon ceramic of course but I'll choose to ignore that and do what I want.
Pro Coat completely paint stripped these, powder coated yellow, applied new Porsche decals and then did a clear powder coat over everything.
Results speak volumes of their quality work. As I'd used the front ones on another project I've recently purchased another pair from Autobahn and had them shipped over here, have since stripped those and sent them in to be done.

Pistons were unmarked, just required a good polish and assembled them with new seals, re plated bleed screws and fitted new brake pads.
Ready to go back on the car, slowly this thing is coming together.


With the painted intakes having cured for an agonisingly long week that could finally be put together, painted the Y pipe I made in black wrinkle which has done a great job of hiding my crappy looking welds.
I did add a MAP sensor with integrated IAT sensor as well right behind the throttle body.
Surprisingly difficult lining up all of the hose clamps so that they appear straight and the screw fittings all line up, yes I'm that anal!
Bracket for the sensors attached and throttle body on the entire intake is finally complete and ready to be plopped on the engine.
I'll probably need to make a small vacuum manifold for the one open port on the manifold but I'll do that once I know how many vacuum references I need.
Not sure yet if I'll delete the charcoal vapour recovery system or not, if I can hide it away and looks tidy I'll probably run it.


Back where it belongs hopefully for the final time. Next small job will be making a cover plate for the back of the fan as that ugly engine bay mounted blower is going away as well. No heat required in a car I'll only drive in nice weather.
Looking at it yesterday makes me realize just how much there is left to do before this can go on the engine dyno for tuning but each step no matter how small gets me closer.
Limited time and wanting to do everything myself can slow things down a lot but it is what it is.

Not much of an update today unfortunately, fact is I've caught up with posting and run out of material.
The next big thing is the exhaust, I need 3:1 merged collectors and I'm too tight to spend 500+ buying them so I've ordered the materials I need to make some. Still difficult enough to find at a reasonable price but a company in Australia had what I needed.
Once those are in I'll make a cutting jig for them and get going on that project.
Yesterday I spent a frustrating few hours installing longer studs for the billet valve covers and found the covers would not go on anymore, the cause being some of the studs are not straight. Tried in vain to straighten a few of them but it just annoyed me even more when that didn't work either. The issue being that the new ones are a fair bit longer so if they are even a little bit off the covers won't go on and I'm reluctant to use bolts threading in and out of aluminium constantly when doing valve adjustments.
So, got online and ordered new ones, at least now I know what to look out for and hopefully these work.
Looking around at what else to do to salvage the day I thought id start pulling the gearbox apart, started with the longtudenal diff lock housing and once this was off was pleasantly surprised to find all of the clutch discs in tact and seemingly in good shape.
The planetary gear which is often damaged on these due to the pins coming out looks great also but 2 of the pins were coming out and the 3rd is also loose.
Once cleaned I'll tig weld these in place on both sides stopping that from happening in the future.

Shocked to see it's been nearly 2 months since an update, let me fill you in on what has been happening or lack there of.
That company in Australia I mentioned last update, they are responsible. Car Mods Australia, THE most useless bunch of no hopers to ever exist.
Placed my order and took my payment immediately (of course) then 3 weeks of nothing, no tracking, nothing. Emailed several times after 3 weeks asking for tracking and finally got a response saying they had no stock and wouldn't be getting any more.....
That's a month of waiting gone, as annoyed as I was the next thing of course would be a refund? right?
Not that simple with these guys, they just don't reply, with the involvement of the bank this took another 3 weeks. Their communication placing the order was great, after that diabolical.
Moving on from that I found a company in the UK this time, total opposite experience and have those parts here now.
In all suffering a severe lack of interest and motivation the project has stalled and nothing has been achieved since the last update.
During the week Pro Coat sent me the completed front calipers which look fantastic so yesterday I thought I'd assemble them and put them on, things went well at first.
I had new kits for them, new pads so things should be easy......

Cleaned up all of the old hardware, pistons, and bought some new stainless retaining bolts. Assembly was straight forward, pistons went in easy so all was well.

Once I went to fit them on the car I realized the error I had made, when I received these calipers from the US one of the balance pipes was damaged so I made a new one. The calipers have arrows on them for the direction of travel of the disc and this is due to the fact that the leading piston is larger, I did not consider this back then and as a result installed the balance pipe in the wrong end.
Sent them off for powder coat that way and of course now cannot remove that pipe without mauling everything and that's exactly what happened yesterday. No matter what the pipe needs to be moved to the other end but the fittings wouldn't budge until the vise grips came out, pipe moved. Powder coat ruined. Time to chuck it in.

Sorry to hear about the troubles with the order!  That absolutely sucks. Am so glad that there?s at least progress again. Been here week after week looking for updates and hope they keep flowing.

The many highs and lows of project car life aye John... Its great when its good, and when its bad, its always winter too....

Yeah man, relying on others is often the problem however this time I'm to blame.
We'll see how things pan out otherwise she's going to get parked for a while.

Ohh man I feel your pain. So many times I reached the feeling of being almost done only to be shot down by the ugly truth of the next thing I didn?t know I had to fix. And I?m just a Google-trained amateur.

Wow, I had no idea this 'Other' section of the forum existed, it was collapsed down and I would just scroll past it. Pleasantly surprised to find this build thread, and has provided some great reading over the past couple of days to now be up to speed.

Seeing the progression through this thread, and seeing the car in person, this thing is epic. Awesome attention to detail, in typical John fashion it will probably be better than the day it rolled off the factory line! If I had $100k laying around there is no doubt about it I would have a 964 in my garage. So until then, great to follow this project and live vicariously though you!

You're getting quite the collection of bloody cool project cars. It must be difficult to know what to drive. Although the Ghia and Jetta are both off the road at the moment right?

Hopefully after your holiday you come back with some fresh motivation (and parts??  ). I can see the finish line for this is not too far away, although a good project often never has a true finish line..

Yep, Jetta I on hold and Ghia also. Both need finishing so are in a never ending cue waiting to be done.
Trying to at least progress things however small that may be, managed to get some yellow paint that matches the calipers pretty well and touched those up with a brush. Bit of epoxy primer first then several coats of yellow. Am I happy, no. But it will have to do.
The front rotors had gone a bit rusty from sitting around and wanted to clean those up, they measure fine and didn't really warrant wasting money to replace just yet.
In the blasting cabinet they go and hit them with glass bead cleaning them up, ran a DA with 120 grit over the pad surface to take the rust off.
Once clean a couple of coats of zinc spray will keep them from rusting, wiped away the zinc on the pad surface with thinners.
Once the car has working brakes the pads will take care of the rest ending up with zinc right up to the edges.

Rotors done they can go back where they belong with the calipers. Either lost the brake hard line from the strut to the caliper or used them on another car, the latter being more likely since the original calipers ended up on the Karmann Ghia.
Not much achieved but it is progress at least.

How are you getting on with the 964 John?

Parked it Nik, lost interest in it after a bunch of not so nice things going on. Had thoughts of just selling it but decided in the end to keep it and just wait till some other stuff is resolved so that I can continue with it.

Don't sell, the motivation will return. Will be a fantastic car once eventually done

First update after a long time away, don't expect lots of progress very quickly but it's hopefully a start to build some enthusiasm again.
Quiet couple days at work this week and boredom got the better of me, the 15 degree bends I bought to make the collectors have been sitting on my bench for a year so that was probably a good place to start.
My metal saw has been a bit neglected which I'm not very proud of so that is the first order of business, get the coolant system cleaned out and working again so that I can cut my pipes to form what will be 2x 3:1 merged collectors.
Took me ages to work out how to cut the angles on the pipes and actually made a mistake on the first one and since I got these from the UK I'll just have to fix the mistake and use it.
Anyway, in the end it was very very easy (Isn't that always the way once you know how)
Marked the tube centerline and made a template to go on the end of the pipe with markings at 30 deg and 60 deg. When the cuts are made at those two points you'll be left with 120 deg of pipe that remains meaning that once all 3 are
put together you're back to a full 360 degrees.

Machined a solid steel stub with a thread in it which fits in the end of the pipe so that I can bolt it to my fixture for cutting, temporarily set up on the cut off saw. A chop saw would be better for this but I'm using what I have.
This cut off saw isn't ideal on stainless but it gets the job done being careful, With the 30 degree mark lined up to the centerpunch mark the first cut is made, at this point the pipe has a slight downward angle.
First cut done it's simply a matter of releasing the clamp and rotating the pipe further around to the 60 degree mark, now the pipe has a slight upward angle and the 2nd cut is made.
Repeat that 5 more times and in theory you have pipes that fit nicely together to make a collector.
Mine came out ok but they need linishing flat due to the deflection of the sawblade. To carry on with it from here I've had to order some new linishing belts and have also ordered some oversize pipe to make the slip
joints which will be a few weeks away still.
I could take the pipes to a muffler shop and have them expand the pipe on the end but to be honest there's no one around here I trust to get it right so I'll just make some sleeves and weld those on.

Good stuff, John. As previously said, it will be worth it to see this to completion.

Good stuff. I have been looking forward to this thread coming back to life.

Linishing belts arrived from China along with stainless tube for the slip joints and some V Band clamps but on closer inspection the V band flanges were made from steel so they were not going to work for my purpose.
As it turns out I had not fully read their cleverly worded ad so had to order some others from another supplier. I mostly import what I need instead of paying the usually high prices locally and to be fair it is often just a lot easier to shop online rather than driving around or chasing things on the phone dealing with people who are not really interested.
Started by linishing the cuts I made last time to get the 3 pipes to fit nicely together, which was harder than I might have thought, tacked those in place and immediately realized how bad my eyesight has gotten as I cannot see the weld puddle very well anymore which makes welding interesting lets say.
Trimmed the collector to size, opened up the pipe diameter to 2.5"  then tacked on the V Band flange trying to keep everything straight and true to end up with this.

I had bought some over sized stainless tube as well and cut those to length to be machined into sleeves for the slip joints as I had no desire to try and find someone to spread the pipes for me.
These will just get welded at one end once everything is together, I will say at this point I did think I would have been much better off buying a set of headers but even if I had it still wouldn't be a bolt on solution with my GT3 rear can.

With those completed at last the real work can begin, wanting things to look symmetrical and straight (which is really difficult btw) it was decided that welding the flanges to the muffler end is better done flat on the bench. These existing pipes and vacuum operated valves I made years ago for version 1 of this set up so thankfully with a bit of clean up work I can reuse here.
Set the muffler up on the bench so that it's as level as possible, with flanges clamped down welded those in place.

Bolted the collectors onto the muffler to get myself a starting point, a simple piece of timber clamped to each collector keeps them both level with each other. The engine is on an engine stand in another part of the shop away from the mess and dust so there's a lot of walking to and fro for each and every little thing but that's just how it is.
The plan is to make all of the pipes from pre made 90, 45 and 180 degree pipes I've bought, tack weld everything and get a professional welded to finish weld it, my tig welding is just not up to snuff.
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Good to see this progressing again

Thankfully the first bends out of the heads are a really tight fit in the exhaust flanges so they stay there easily without having to tack weld them, flanges are nice and thick Stainless at 10mm.
This makes small adjustments as I go a lot easier, started with the rear most pipe just taping the pipes together with masking tape and working my way towards the collector.
Pretty fortunate actually that most of the bends I got needed minimal cutting apart from the middle pipes as those were a little more tricky needing to meet up with the upper part of the collector.
Lots of trips back and forth from the linisher to the engine trying to get the fit up to have no gaps so that the welder has an easier time welding this stuff together.
One side fully completed, well taped together at least I don't think that looks too bad.


Onto the other side, a copy paste really. I did find a nicer way of doing the middle pipe on this side which just looked a bit nicer so I ended up changing the middle pipe on the opposite side as well to match.
Unfortunately as much as I tried to tape everything as tightly as possible there is still movement in the pipes but this gives a good idea of how everything fits and looks.
At this point I started removing one pipe at a time to tack each joint together but that also wasn't as easy as i had hoped, the exhaust studs were too long to allow the flanges to go back over them with a fully
rigid pipe.
But, loosening everything off and a wiggle here and there had one side on fully tacked up. Had a local fabricator call in to have a look and he will take on welding everything up for me in the coming weeks.
As welding pulls and distorts things he'll fully weld the pipes but not weld the flanges on, I'll then assemble everything in place, flip the engine upside down and tack the flanges in place which he'll then finish off.
Still to source some brackets and springs for the collectors but that is minor detail better done when everything is fully welded.
I'll be glad to be able to move on from this exhaust project,


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