I really am a lousy blogger… I should have pages of stuff about my cars but there’s nothing yet. Time to correct that oversight.
Back in 2013 I was cruising around on eBay and started looking at cars. One of my long time favorites is the Porsche 928 – my first boss had one and I still remember getting to ride in it, crammed in the tiny back seat. This was also the very first time I heard the then brand new song from Michael Jackson – “Beat It” – on what at the time was an awesome sound system. (The stereo available in the 928 was crap but I thought it sounded great back then.)
I placed what I thought was an incredibly lowball bid on a car that was up in Portland. My best friend lives up there and I go there a lot so I figured that on the off chance I got the car I’d just zip up and grab it. Short story is that I got the car and went up to Portland with my truck and trailer and brought it back.
It was a pretty nice 1980 “15 foot” car and looked to be in reasonably good shape. It started right up, went forwards, backwards and I got it on the trailer and back home without any problems. Started changing out the fluids and took it for a quick ride since I’d never actually driven one of these cars before.
Well, it wasn’t a very long drive because I learned that one of the brakes dragged somethin’ terrible. The oil leaks were nothing compared to, say, a 1985 Jaguar XJS, but there were more than a few. The worst seemed to be from the transmission which I figured was just a gasket change.
As I learned more about the car I figured out that one of my first jobs would need to be what’s known as an “intake refresh”. There’s this guy that has created some of the best dang project walkthroughs ever named Dwayne – this is his description of the job.
Well, there were more things wrong with the car… starting with the fact that it was an automatic transmission car. Turns out that Porsche built most of these things as “slush boxes” since they were a bit more luxury oriented than performance oriented. I don’t care much about that – I wanted a manual transmission.
I found this guy down in Alameda that had a 1979 car that was wrecked with only 28k miles on it. It had gone from garage to garage over the years with various people trying to restore it until finally someone realized that the subframe / unibody was bent and it was never going to work right. By the time I got it the guy was parting it out but was having trouble getting any money for the stuff.
Digression is that the older 928s were built with 16 valve engines that for the time produced pretty decent horsepower but in the mid 80s were replaced by 32 valve redesigns that bumped the output to what is still pretty respectable. (The newer car engines produce unheard of power these days – you can get a pretty reasonably priced car that will kick the booty of anything built 30 years ago.)
The 16v cars aren’t especially prized – all of them are expensive to fix and pretty much any 30 year old car needs fixing. That may change if the car ever becomes collectable but for now cars that aren’t in decent shape are basically junk. I wound up making two trips – first time I got the shell of the car with engine, second trip I got the transmission.
I spent my birthday in September of 2013 underneath a 1985 928 pulling the transmission and clutch so I now had two transmissions and the prized clutch / flywheel.
Did I mention that we remodeled our house that year? Yeah. Then we sold it and moved in 2014… Oh, and I got this idea to buy an old Jaguar that my oldest and I were going to fix up for her.
Most of those projects did not go smoothly.
That’s where I’ll stop for now. I’ll get a page set up for just the car? Maybe but the point of this ramble is that I’m finally working on the thing and actually making progress.
