He could write pretty much the same article about owning an OG Chrysler minivan, which is arguably a more historically significant vehicle but built by a make that prompts sneers about reliability and credit scores from most here, and it would just be considered trashy or prompt pearl clutching by most of the readership.
Amazing the breadth of preconceived notions that can be leveraged with a badge on a grill. Having the presence of mind and ability to leverage readership demographics like this is what really separates good writers and editors from the mediocre.
You might be overanalyzing a bit. I think it really comes down to sports cars being cool & vans being…vans. All the “Porsche” part really does is get more clicks (because people know what it is).
I think most people here would be fawning over the article were it a Toyota Previa or some other car that does not bring to mind "transportation that a day laborer would have driven circa <10-15yr after its model year>" which is what happens to a lot of successful vehicles.
The starting rituals reminded me of my '77 Olds Cutlass with the junkyard intake and monster carbs and all sorts of other unwise additions to an already crappy and clapped out machine. Only two people could start that car, and what with the bailing wire holding the axles and frame together no one ever wanted to try towing it.
There's a difference between bad cars and hilariously bad cars. The OG Chrysler minivan was historically significant. I respect people who still use them as work vehicles, or people who embrace the hacker mentality to turn them into something they weren't originally (there are a few minivan dragsters). But they aren't celebrated as great driver's cars.
A better comparison to the Porsche 914 would be an MG roadster - or if you want to stick with Chrysler, then a Dodge Omni GLH. By modern standards both of these are unreliable, uncomfortable, and hard to drive, but like the 914 they are celebrated by enthusiasts. Part of the reason is because despite their flaws, and despite being relatively hard to drive, they reward skill. While slow to accelerate, they handle well - allowing a skilled driver to make good lap times on a track.
② it was an aftermarket camper van conversion with some slight design issues in the pop top, not a Westfalia;
③ after I rebuilt the engine a second time we sold it, so, blessedly, it's not mine anymore. My engine rebuild survived for a couple of years until the new owner drove it in second gear for an hour at highway speeds, overheating the engine to the point where it punched a pushrod through the crankcase.
I don't think he destroyed the engine on purpose, if that's what you meant. I did sell it on purpose though. I rebuilt the engine on purpose too, because without a working engine the market value of the van was scrap metal.
This remind me of how amazingly complex a modern car is in terms of making it easy to drive and how may iterations / how much evolution has taken place.
A friend of mine tweaked a sensor on his car and it wouldn't recalibrate, which disabled all of the electronic assists. It drives like a shopping cart now.
The old cars have better or worse aesthetics? Something can't have "more" aesthetics, it's not quantifiable. That's like saying something has more temperature, instead of a higher or lower temperature.
It's not always the dog in the fight, but the fight in the dog.
I knew a guy that was an incredible mountain biker, won all the races he entered etc. He used to show up with crappy bikes probably 10lbs heavier than everyone else... he'd still win. Sometimes you either have it or you don't, and all the equipment in the world won't help you.
In this case a 914 is close to the perfect car for autocross. They are super light, so they change direction like a fly. The mid engine layout means they have excellent balance. Autocross is a low speed event, so the lack of power isn't the penalty it would be on a larger circuit. With modern tires a 914 should do extremely well.
The mid engine induced balance and short wheelbase on the 914 just made it ridiculous for autocross. It was like playing a video game where you stick to the ground. I certainly raced more powerful and faster cars, but it was possible to coax everything out of the 914 with an ease that few other cars could match.
Those are a blast. I took a friend's one around a listed 15 mph corner at darn near highway speeds (on warm semi-slick tires) with not near the understeer you'd expect.
Yea I've seen some pretty sprightly little 90HP cars do autocross really well. Old 2002 BMWs, Porsche 914s, Mini Coopers, and some little Toyota spyders.
That’s a funny sport. For years the SF area events were dominated by a guy who ran a ‘78 Toyota Corolla hatchback. Or what had once been that car, anyway.
MOT surely won't check half the things that are wrong with this car though? Shitty starting, busted gearbox? Most 90s supercars wouldn't pass if that was a problem :p
What do MOTs say about antique cars? I've had some really rough old Minis pass the MOT in the past.
My first car was a 914. Love and miss it to this day.
At some point the solenoid died (or some other electrical component). So to start it, you'd have to reach under the car with a screwdriver (or some other piece of metal, but I kept a screwdriver in the car for this purpose), and short out across two terminals.
You then had 10-20 seconds to get out from under the car, into the driver's seat, and turn the key. As a practiced manouver, it was pretty quick.
Wow, what a blast from the past. My first car was a 1990 Mercury Grand Marquis, and it developed this same solenoid issue. My grandpa taught me that same trick of shorting past the solenoid so that the car can start. My friends were always very curious why there was a hammer underneath the passenger's seat, at least until I told them to hand it to me and crank the engine when I gave the shout.
Kind of wild that both you and GP developed tricks for shorting the solenoid when a replacement solenoid is like $20 and 10 minutes of work. Well, at least for a Mercury Grand Marquis aka the Ford Crown Victoria, I can't speak for Superior German Engineering.
The neat thing about Ford solenoids of that era were that they were very conveniently located near the top of the firewall and can be easily triggered manually if needed with a big screwdriver across the leads. (And hope you don’t get electrocuted in the process.)
Contemporary GM solenoids were integrated into the starter motor and were a real pain to get to. Certainly not impossible to do the screwdriver trick but far less convenient with needing to crawl around on the ground and all. Being located right next to the exhaust headers also meant they were easily susceptible to heat soak problems which would cause a failure to activate - especially if you have a hot-running high performance engine. It was actually a pretty common and easy mod on those GMs to use a Ford solenoid and bypass the one on the starter motor.
I had a '73 VW Bug -- the solenoid failed in the middle of a post-college beach camping adventure through Baja with a friend. We too designated a screwdriver just for this purpose and kept track of whose turn it was to slide under the car to short the terminals. We became quite adept at it! Good times...
On mine, the well-corroded cast-pot-metal door handle snapped in two. No problem: The ignition key could be wedged between the remaining stub of a handle and the frame, producing just enough leverage to pop the door catch.
In high school, my friends and I managed to resuscitate a 914 that had been stowed away in a garage for over a decade. We towed it to the top of a hill with a pickup truck and attempted a clutch start after we'd picked up some speed. None of us (especially me in the driver's seat) expected this to work, but amazingly it fired right up. One of my friends managed to jog alongside and jump into the car as I tried to keep it puttering along, and we ripped a few laps around the neighborhood. Soonafter, we stopped the engine and were never able to get it started again. Thanks for bringing up this memory. Cool article.
My father had one of these just sort of gathering dust in the garage when I was growing up, utterly shocked when I turned 16 and he handed me the keys.
I still like to casually drop "oh yeah, I used to have a Porsche back when I was 16." Although I must say it was in immeasurably better shape than this one :D
I still dream of finding an old 914 and giving it an electric conversion… I'd have to do something about that rear window, though, it whips air forward when you drive with the top down.
The 924 had a design flaw in the engine. The oil pressure sensor was located in the oil pan at the base of the return pipe to the cam, rather than at the top of the pipe at the cam. Thus, the pipe could become clogged and no oil would reach the cam shaft, while giving no indication of the problem. Needless to say, this could be very bad.
Reminds me of the bad rep the 2.4 VM turbo diesel got in the Range Rover Classic. Good engine, used in some Chryslers, and boats, from the 80s to the early 2000s. Why? Because the Land Rover engineers mounted the cooling flyid tank too low, the 5th (?) cylinder risked not getting enough cooling and tended to crack. The fix is to mount the cooling tank a couple of cm higher up in the engine bay.
Come on now, the Porsche engine in the 944 is miles better than the Audi one in the 924. Got rid of all the vibration issues. Granted the base 944 is a bit slow, but I’ve currently got an ‘86 951 and it’s still a great car today. The weight distribution on it is just perfect. Much more fun to drive and way more reliable than the ‘85 Ferrari 308 that I recently sold.
I had to sell my beloved '86 951 to an out-of-stater due to California emissions madness[1], and miss it every day. I don't, however, miss the hours a month spent underneath it keeping it driving. Everything except the turbo was aftermarket by the time I was done with it. The mid-80s were this weird point in time where cars were still wrench-able, but manufacturers started adding electronic gizmos, not knowing how to make those gizmos reliable. It's like they were still figuring out how to make everything from engine ECUs to power windows, and trying ideas out on production cars.
(It was also my first experience with an interference engine, and the terror of having your timing belt break.)
1: Car blew clean as a whistle, even to clean air standards that never existed in 1986, but since the intake and exhaust had all sorts of parts not officially stamped with the CA bureaucracy seal of approval, it had to go :(
I don't know about that. More powerful engine, 4 wheel disc brakes (rather than 2 disc, 2 drum setup on a base 924) and the switch to electronic fuel injection instead of K-Jetronic all seem like decent upgrades to me. I had an '83 944 as my daily driver for a couple of years and for a poorly maintained 25 year old sports car it wasn't so bad.
The combination of an interference engine and a super-long manually tensioned timing belt was rather unfortunate though. I never had an issue with my belt, but adjusting the tension was very stressful. Especially since I was too cheap to buy the proper expensive tool and was using one of the crappy "cricket" ones.
Those are slowly gett;ng expensive as well. 928s seem to be reasonably priced so far. No wonder with a car that was barely considered a Porsch back the day.
It was one of the potential follow up projects, once the first one is done. That will take at least another two years... And I won't get permission for another project car in our drive way!
I have a 65/66 912 converted to a 2.7 liter six. I love
this car.
When I got it there were issues. I have worked through many of them. The PO did not understand the regulator for instance. I gutted the wiring and redid it. It now charges and there is no battery drain.
Like OP the lights were not good. I replaced those with LEDs. The suspension was worn, it was completely replaced.
The engine has good compression and the leak down showed it was healthy. It did leak oil though, sealed the engine. It no longer leaks.
You can’t just buy one of these cars and drive it. You have to wrench on it. It takes care and feeding.
Is the electric conversion still a thing? I want an eclectic car with no monitors, no software updates, no surveillance (none of the new electric car offers that - they are calling home for updates and god knows why way too often, and they have bigger monitors than my 14" work laptop).
Production EV battery packs almost always include some sort of BMS and have lots of interlocks and safeties. You don't really have to do much to work with them other than to talk to the BMS and not exceed voltage and current limits. If you do, the BMS will trip the pack's internal HV contactor.
Safely installing/modding/repairing automotive fuel systems is likely just as, if not more, dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. There are few interlocks on automotive fuel systems beyond "if the engine stops spinning, turn off the fuel pump" or in some vehicles, there might be a crash/rollover fuel shutoff switch.
People think working on EVs is super scary when reality is that you can usually pull a cover in the rear passenger area, find and pull a bright orange plug, and the HV system is rendered completely safe. EVs don't have a billion places you can scald or burn yourself, their "engine" compartments generally don't have much or any spinning objects that could deglove your hands, there's no fuel or oil to catch fire, no high pressure hydraulics...
Do any of those BMS do cooling? The parking lot at work hits 115F regularly and that is bad for batteries. I'd love a conversion, but I worry I'd get nissan leaf battery life vs tesla s battery life. I'm thinking something like an old mazda bongo import. For that matter, do any of the kits power the ac compressor?
All true, but a pack that has been in a crash might be broken in subtle and hard to detect ways. A short in the pack would be a quick way to ruin your day.
Is there a place you know of to get production EV battery packs? I'm an amateur mechanic, and this might be up my alley, but (as above) I'm worried about these battery fire situations.
Eh? I literally got a brand new electric VW e-Up last week, it's exactly that. It even still has analog dials, and VW provides a mount for your phone instead of an "infotainment" system. The height of sophistication is DAB radio and heated front window and seats.
I highly recommend it, it's a hoot - and with 150 miles range and rapid charging capability it's more than enough for all my needs.
Not in the US I don't think. Even manufacturers that have been generally anti-touchscreen (read: mazda) went and stuffed in touchscreen HVAC controls because "people expect that in electric cars" or something.
The problem isn't only the dashboard, it is the pervasive surveillance. This car is better than most but I've read here before that it still had some flaws. Can't find the post at the moment however.
Most any vehicle with "telematics" available made in the last ~10 years is calling home with your location and a variety of information like cabin and outdoor air temperature, whether the wipers and headlights are on, etc. The data is sold to third parties, with varying levels of anonymization. This happens regardless of whether you're paying for a subscription to their telematics, whether you have a GPS navigation system optioned, etc.
I know this because a friend worked for a company trying to monetize that data for weather forecasting.
If you want to disable this nonsense, just unplug the cellular antenna and connect it to a dummy load.
The inverter/regen braking, and charger units do have some firmware, but once everything is wired up and working, should work indefinitely without future OTA updates. If the national charging standard changes at some point in the future (or gets exported to another area (europe) that uses a different standard) you'll need to swap out the charger.
Companies like EV West in California and Swindon in the UK offer bolt-in kits for 1960s cars, in particular the VW Beetle and the original Cooper Mini
Long term, as engine parts become harder to source, especially for low volume european cars, Electric Conversion is rapidly becoming the accepted way to keep these classics on the road for another 100 years.
Engines like the VW typ 4 in the 914 are probably not going extinct anytime soon, you can order a ready to go longblock fairly easily [0]. For larger cars, a GM gen IV V8 can be had with CA-compliant emissions out of any parts catalog [1].
Agreed; I suspect the reason why the VW has been targeted by EV makers is largely because the tuner/enthusiast crowd is quite large, and also it's an extremely well understood/documented platform. I haven't seen the EV West stuff up close in person yet, but it looks like as a platform to develop a set of standard equipment for other cars, the VW is a good initial choice for those reasons.
I have a similarly size/weight prewar french car, and when the engine finally gives out, will probably pull out the petrol engine and swap in a VW kit, but with a custom bell housing adapter. A 70-100hp electric motor meant for a VW is not a lot of power, but can provide enough low end torque to keep the car driving in modern traffic for 100-130 miles, which is probably enough for the use classic cars get.
> they have bigger monitors than my 14" work laptop
Unfortunately, though you might find one with a smaller screen, you won't find ANY new car with no screen these days -- backup cameras (and, by implication, a screen to see its feed) have been required on new cars in the US since 2018.
Yea electric conversion is a thing and according to Rich rebuilds they are making better kits instead of wiring everything manually.
But like all car projects it’s a money pit. Expect to spend $50k in parts and labor. And it may or may not be street legal for that price.
Driving the vehicle in places where you don’t have cell service or where it can be cold would be a bad idea if the conversion breaks down. Or just get a satellite phone and AAA.
It's still a thing. It's a lot of work though and it pretty much never makes financial sense versus just buying a used Leaf or something. But it's one way to get a car that's exactly what you want.
It definitely is a thing for classic cars. These people even have a discovery channel show about them. They look awesome, and are within easy electric range of my house!
That's a brilliant idea, and I think I might be well-positioned to offer it.
Not with Teslas specifically; I think surveillance is woven so deep into the fabric of the vehicle, it'd be a lot of work to get it out. But with most other makes, it's just a telematics unit that's easy enough to remove or bypass, and most of the other functionality just keeps working.
How would one price such a service? Often the research is 99% of the work, and the actual labor is just pulling a connector or two, perhaps fabricating a short bypass harness.
Surprisingly enough, you can get that from the BMW i3.
- The monitor is necessary but it is not a touch screen and it comes with a nice clicky knob to control it. Plus you can make shortcuts to go to certain screens with the radio station buttons.
- 2014 - 2017? all shipped with a 3g module that is now unsupported and not working.
- You can get access to munros teardown report for $10(1), and if you know where to look ;) you can find the service tech training manuals and their repair instructions for free which are all very detailed.
- realoem.com has exploded parts diagrams with part numbers for everything.
The only negatives really is:
- buying OEM parts comes with that BMW price premium and the dealer will 100% rip you off if you ever take it to them for repairs.
- The OEM tires, the only kind that fit on the OEM wheels, have terrible tread life.
I have an electric converted 914 if you want to pick it up. It’s even in need of a few battery packs so it won’t all be done before you get your hands on it.
Those that haven’t burned (fuel injected high pressure fuel lines degraded and cracked) have rusted out, just sits too low to ground and can’t be left that way.
A vulnerability shared with all K-Jetronic engines. At some point I got clued in and kept a fire extinguisher on board my own 914, just in case. And it saw use, not on my own car, but doing damage control on a stranger's VW Beetle, in flames on the freeway shoulder.
It's really a weird Volkswagen/Porsche frankenstein, despite what the badge says. Porsche designed it, Volkswagen built it. Outside the US, the Volkswagon version is 914/4, and the Porsche version being a 914/6. (The last digit references the number of cylinders). In the US market both versions were branded as Porsche because US buyers were deemed unable to understand that two different car brands used the same body style. (Times have changed.)
I remember it being referred to as Volksporsche. It was a strange mix of feelings. Nobody took it as a serious Porsche while owners that normally wouldn't be able to afford a 'real' one really loved the car for it quirks. To me this is a much better Volksporsche than the Cayenne/Touareg . And in hindsight the people who loved this democratized version of a sports car have a better place in history than all those who started the SUV boom in Europe's cities. While Porsche was made a bit fun of at the time, today's Porsches feel like an anachronistic thing that nobody desires but super rich and wannabes.
My first car was also a 914 that the father of a friend of mine had sitting in his garage. The transmission was shot (no first gear) and the suspension had given out but I bought it anyway for $800 and put about $2000 into fixing it.
It was a really fun car to drive although it also shared many of the same quirks as mentioned in this story.
lol, your memory jogged my memory of me and my neighbor, me 14, he 16, finding an almost-completely disassembled moped in the woods behind my house. It had been completely stripped--out of spite, it would appear, since everything not firmly attached to the steel frame, including all of the plastic shell parts, lights, switches, etc, had been strewn all around. Of the few things attached to the frame, it was lucky the engine, gas tank, and rear wheel, remained. We lugged this 200+ pound pile of junk a few hundred yards through the woods into my garage. Just replaced the spark plug cable, and it fricking started up! We then proceeded to replace the front wheel with a BMX bike tire, fashioned a makeshift seat out of a banana bicycle seat with some angle-iron, and I rode that heap of junk, wires flailing off the frame, for over a year. I got pulled over by the police for not having lights. Problem was, in the mess of wiring that did exist, I was randomly splicing into whatever, including a feed that apparently hadn't gone through a voltage regular, and would burn out the tail lights if I hit the brakes at too high of an RPM. After the police incident, my dad wouldn't let me ride it on the street anymore, and then eventually he took it to the junk yard one day when I was at school.
lol that's a cool story you probably damaged the rings and cylinder wall by force starting it without taking some precautions first. If you have an engine that has sat a long time you definitely should pull the spark plugs and spay lubricant down the holes. Let it sit overnight. Then gently try and turn over the engine by hand and see if the rings are free or not. Something sitting so long the ring tend to stick to cylinder wall and turning over the engine suddenly can cause them to damage the cylinder wall and damage the rings. So while running down the hill you probably did some damage but it was moving fast enough that it could get enough compression to run while you had it running. After you stopped it and attempted to start it again there would be less oil on the pistons as well as any damage greatly reducing compression and preventing it from starting.
Likely not enough lubrication happening. Pity, that engine would have been perfectly good if it had been treated a bit more carefully, and a matching numbers 914 would be worth something today. They're a very interesting car, mid engined lightweight sports car that handles a lot better than you would expect from something that old.
There was a six cylinder version of this as well (super rare) and they made a prototype 914/8 which was never offered for sale, afaik only two were made (one for Ferdinand Porsche, one for Ferdinand Piëch).
Yes the gears! The amount of "play" in the gearbox was insane. Couple that with the like 3 foot long stick handle and IN GEAR I could wiggle the stick in a like foot wide circle.
Once you had driven it for a while you got to know the "feel" of it and had no problems, but like in the article someone new to driving it would have had a really hard time lol.
My 1985 Jeep CJ-7 is similar... I can be rolling down the road in 3rd gear and the gear knob will occasionally start oscillating in a 4-inch circle all on its own.
Same here, but with a 1972 BMW. My brake vacuum booster never worked so it is like stomping on a rock. On a cold day you had to feather the throttle, clutch, and brake at the same time until it got warm. I live in a warm climate so it's been tuned to idle well on a hot Texas summer day.
Reminds me of my first car, a Mini Clubman estate with the fake woody panels on the side. The only thing you needed to know was that it had been re-engined with a hill-climb tuned Cooper S engine. Great on an island with a 40mph speed limit and too many rich folk with Ferraris and the like, as it could out accelerate them anywhere on the island. Sure it wouldn't go faster than 50, but that was fine as it got to that speed almost instantaneously.
Yowch. I thought that limit was only for the other Channel Islands. At least in say, the Isle of Man, you can get it nicely into triple digits on a regular basis.
My friend in high school had a Mercury Capri like that. Dad was a drag racer, so that thing could beat anything up to 75mph. Then it'd rattle itself to bits.
So, apparently there is no mandatory vehicle inspection in the US. Of course there isn't, it would violate the freedom to drive with an unroadworthy car.
It depends on the state. Most of the ones that do exist are concerned with things like “do you have seat belts? are there rear view mirrors? do the turn signals work? is the check engine light on?” Classic/antique vehicles are also often exempt.
I'm not so sure on that. Some of the states that don't test are pretty damn inhospitable to cars and bad emissions is often the first sign of the end of the vehicle.
But there has to be a pretty lucrative trade in buying 'scrap' (emissions failing, $50 for-the-steel) cars in some states, and shipping them over to non-testing states where they can be sold as 'kinda old but totally usable for a few more years, $3000'.
In CA "The California Smog Check Program requires vehicles that were manufactured in 1976 or later to participate in the biennial (every two years) smog check program in participating counties." so it would be exempt based on the year that it was manufactured.
Unless the Official Emissions Test rules state that the tech performing the test has to start it, and that it can't be failed unless the emissions are too high when it's running...
Imagine my surprise when this year my 1996 Toyota was suddenly an "antique" by state law. Yearly inspection for antique cars is a safety check as you described - does it have working windshield wipers, lights and seat belts, but no longer any emissions check.
When it comes to bad things that happen on the road mechanical condition is a rounding error compared to things people knew were risky and did anyway. I see no reason we should invest more than a token amount of societal effort chasing the long tail like that.
The fact that you start your comment with "in the US" when anyone even slightly familiar with the place knows that pretty much everything about it is a state by state deal is a massive red flag for a comment that serves no purpose but to convert pearl clutching into internet virtue points. The fact that you end your comment with a back handed quip deriding some imagined notion of freedom more or less confirms it.
Beyond 30yr the people driving them are doing it for fun and aren't going to generally be running bald tires down the highway in the rain and when they do they are doing it full well knowing that they have to be super careful. Basically they know what they're getting into and don't need the state to tell them why working lights are good and brake pads shouldn't make metal noises.
Every state I have lived in requires you to register the vehicle in that state:
NC: Within 60 days of establishing a permanent residence in North Carolina, new residents who plan to operate a motor vehicle must get a North Carolina driver license and title and register their vehicles with the N.C. Division of Motor Vehicles.
GA: If you own or lease a vehicle in Georgia, you must register it with the state. [...] New residents should register their vehicle no more than 30 days from the date they move to Georgia.
Top of this thread questions whether there are mandatory safety inspections. There are in most states for most vehicles, including NC, where the author lives and where this vehicle is very likely registered. Due to the age of the vehicle, it is exempt from inspections.
You went off on a tangent saying that you don't have to register a vehicle in the state you're in. You do in NC, as well as other states I'm familiar with.
You're now suggesting ways to evade the registration requirement, which may be illegal. This is in no way a rebuttal to the registration and safety inspection requirements that were being asked about at the top of this thread. Exploiting a loophole - including potentially breaking the law - to avoid a requirement doesn’t get rid of the requirement.
The state of Washington is an interesting case. They had annual inspections and then somebody ran the numbers and found that so few cars were being flagged, that it was an enormous waste of resources. They got rid of their inspection requirement.
More programs should be run like that. Set a goal, create a program, then periodically evaluate if the goal is still the same and if the program is effective.
Many states barely even check anything anyway. Out of six states I've had a vehicle inspection in, only one (Maryland) did more than check lights, wipers, brakes, and horn. Inspections seem to be more a revenue stream than anything else.
I think most states will fail a car with the "check engine" light on. For cars in the northeast, keeping the CEL off gets more and more expensive every winter. I had a truck that was getting a new oxygen sensor (there were 6 on the car) every year from age 8 to 12. The truck drove fine with them malfunctioning, but it couldn't pass inspection. My current Jeep, I assume is going to need about $2K every year in maintenance to get it to pass inspection. And the only reason to do the maintenance is the inspection, because it also drives fine.
> I think most states will fail a car with the "check engine" light on.
Except Maryland, none of the states I've done an inspection looked inside the vehicle. The states that did emissions would fail if check engine light is on, but if you disconnect the battery right before to reset it then they might pass it.
Contrasting that to California, I had an old well-maintained Volvo station wagon. California tightened the emissions standards on that model until it failed smog (at 110% of NOX limit), and made me upgrade the catalytic to an after market one. It then passed at 85% the NOX limit.
The state strongly encouraged me to send it to a Golden Shield mechanic. As part of the work, they "checked" the air intake filter and MAF sensor on the engine, which was, of course, filthy. It sits in a big plastic box on that car. Instead of reinstalling the filter, they jammed it in sideways and closed the box. I figured it out later, and spent about an hour picking bits of leaves out of the downstream air intake.
Of course, this cost 95% of the limit past which California gives you a free pass till the next smog inspection. (And almost 2x the market value of the car.)
I'm convinced the whole thing is a make-work program that's holding our air quality hostage. (And I'm strongly for tightening emissions standards!)
>I'm convinced the whole thing is a make-work program that's holding our air quality hostage. (And I'm strongly for tightening emissions standards!)
My state on the other coast does (or used to) openly admit in the official training slides for the inspection license that the reason they have safety inspections is so that holding a state inspection license (they do a single license that covers both emissions and safety) is lucrative and therefore license holders have a financial incentive not to fudge emissions inspections.
Pretty much every business who is supplied a customer base by force of law gives the quality of service you describe.
> Depress the clutch as you would in any car, and pull the knob from its secure location out of first gear. Now you will become adrift in the zone known to early Porsche owners as “Neverland” and your quest will be to find second gear. Prepare yourself for a ten-second-or-so adventure. Do not go straight forward with the shift knob, as you will only find Reverse waiting there to mock you with a shriek of high-speed gear teeth machining themselves into round cylinders.
Patterns like those are really, really really common on truck transmissions.
One rail is 1st/reverse. Another rail is 2nd/3rd and the last rail is 4th or OD and direct. Whether the "fore is a lower gear than aft" holds between the 2nd and 3rd rails is a function of whether or not it's a the pair of gears that constitute "forward gear on the right rail) will either be greater or less than 1:1 depending on if it's an overdrive transmission whereas the rear position on the right rail will always be direct for reasons that boil down to "that's the sensible way to build it".
There's not much to "figure out" when you have a direct lever that goes into the shifter.
Exactly, the more the device can assume the operator is trained the simpler it is - so truck transmissions are closer to the "Platonic Transmission Form" if you will than fancy car transmissions.
The Deuce doesn't even have synchronizers, you're expected to double clutch and handle that part yourself.
Fun fact: the torque converter was invented a few years before the automatic transmission - and some cars were sold with a manual transmission and a torque converter. With only two or three forward gears, they found most of the customers would leave the car in the top gear and just accelerate slowly ...
The Buick Dynaflow was almost entirely reliant on a multiple-element torque converter, in front of a 2-speed manual similar to the Powerglide. Slow and inefficient, but very smooth.
What a blast from the past. I learnt to drive using a VW Golf, and I've always thought this shift pattern is just standard on German cars with manual transmission (at least in the 90s).
One thing I don't see mentioned is that you first have to press down onto the knob, then shift forward, in order to shift the transmission into R. Simply pushing the knob forward won't go from N to R.
First time I rented a German car I yelled out in the parking garage for help! Some kind strangers explained this to me about the reverse and I got on my way.
From a video I saw recently I think some of the old lancias (group b stuff) were similar, the pattern was not shown but the driver referred to being careful with first so as not to launch the car in reverse.
So I’m guessing this was one of the standard gear patterns in the late 70s / early 80s euros, back when car affordances were often nebulous concepts.
Reverse lockouts came around in the 80s or so, so his 914 wouldn't have one. On older transmissions you're free to try to ram it into reverse at 100 kph if you really want to try.
My Ford Contour SVT (Mondeo in the UK I think?) had a collar under the shift knob that you had to pull upwards to shift into reverse. Had never seen that before, and I felt awfully embarrassed to ask the guy selling me the car how it worked.
I had a '92 Nissan Sentra as my first car in the early 2000's, a hand-me-down from my older brother - it also had this dog-leg shift pattern. Looks like it wasn't just German cars that had this transmission.
Definitely burned out a clutch early from learning to drive and learning to drive stick at the same time, but damn do I miss it sometimes.
> this shift pattern is just standard on German cars with manual transmission
"Standard?" Hmm. We have two cars with manual transmission, a VW Sharan and a VW Up:
The Sharan has R at the top left, then (reading across) 1 3 5 with 2 4 6 below; so 6th is at the bottom right.
The Up only has 5 forward gears, but for some reason they decided to put R at the bottom right (so down from 5th... you can probably see where this story is going)
I have once, and only once, been driving along at motorway speed in the Up, in 5th, and briefly thought I was in the Sharan, and started trying to change up to 6th, except the Up only has 5, and you're heading for R, not 6th. Happily I didn't complete the change...
> Reverse in the bottom right is the “normal” 5-speed reverse spot no?
I've driven a lot of 5-speed manual transmission rental cars over the decades, and my impression is that reverse in the top left is (or certainly was) the far more common layout:
I'd have to agree with GP here. It was my impression that reverse in the bottom right is the 'classic' spot for a 5-gear manual transmission, unless a reverse lockout is used (then it is usually the top left spot).
> and then rapidly wig-wag the shift knob side-to-side along a lateral axis.
I learned this driving my first car which was a similar vintage Karmann Ghia. It still did it out of habit twenty years later driving my stick-shift Jetta. The second YouTube video I found of someone learning to drive a KG was doing it instinctively as well. [1] I guess there's so much play you just learn to wig-wag a little to see if you're in gear or not.
Not sure if this is specific to Porsches, I think several factors are at play here: (1) old cars (even Porsches) were not so precision-engineered as they are today. Today you can operate the gear shift using only two fingers, not so in the seventies; (2) of course, a car being ~50 years old doesn't help either...
That part of the story reminded me of the 1978 MGB I had as a teenager. If you had just a little leftward pressure on the stick going from 1st to 2nd the gearbox would happily announce "welcome to reverse!". The throw between gears was so small I ended up just using my middle finger to push down from 1st to 2nd and 3rd to 4th and then hooking my thumb around the knob to go from 2nd to 3rd. 5th gear was electric - a little switch that seemed to break every few months.
It’s a better pattern for racing since you can more easily shift between 2nd and 3rd gear in a quicker way. Older Ferraris (I believe the Testarossa and the TR512, but maybe others too) also have the same pattern.
The Ferrari V6/V8 cars from the 206 Dino through the 328 have that pattern, but they switched to a standard shift pattern in the 348. You can't accidentally shift into reverse though, as the metal shift gate has a stop on it. You have to push down to get past the stop and into reverse.
> since you can more easily shift between 2nd and 3rd gear in a quicker way
That is in part a secondary effect of how wide and crisp the offsets are between gears (how 'deep' the H shape is). On the gear boxes people tend to like, going from 2nd to 3rd, and 3rd to 4th take very close to the same time. On my little roadster I'd just stomp on the clutch and throw the gear knob in the general vicinity of where it needed to be, relying on hand-eye coordination and the synchros to do the real work (I missed maybe 3 shifts a year, and half of those when I was tired).
Compare this to the car I learned stick on - the infamous Chevy Citation, made during the nadir of Detroit - where the gearbox was roughly shaped like an X, although at the time it felt like an l. I lost track of how many times I accidentally upshifted instead of downshifted at a stop sign, and that engine had less torque than an electric pencil sharpener, so the engine would simple stall the moment I tried to let the clutch out.
The roadster I subsequently drove, I experimented and found that if I was even a little careful I could get moving from a dead stop in 3rd gear. Basically a modified tractor engine. All torque, no horsepower.
The name "Neverland" is new to me, but I remember that place of limbo well. Assuming the tranny is in good order, there's a firm spring detent that generally saves the driver from 1->R upshift failures.
The 1->4 mistake OTOH, having drifted a little too far right in Neverland, was easily fallen into, and the shuddering deceleration that follows may have been the cause of a few rear-end collisions over the years.
I had a 3 speed + R transmission in a 1970 Ford. It was originally a column shift but the original owner converted it to a standard floor shift. I don't know if that was the reason for the weird shift pattern it had (nor do I know the original shift pattern), but by the time I got it, it was:
edit: just got to the author’s blurb at the bottom. He was an engineer on the original Miata, so it’s no surprise that he knows what he’s talking about.
I think part of the fun of 914's is how raw they are. Once you get all the individual car's eccentricities down its the same fun, but you feel like its all your secret on the good days when the car is working as intended.
The fact that they are dog slow is made up by the fact that your sitting on this little motor making a huge racket. Its the "I must be going fast, given how much noise i'm hearing" thing.
Your vehicle will never develop this number of issues on the day you buy it.
You buy it with a trivial occasional issue that can be worked around, and the issue gradually starts happening more and more often and getting harder and harder to work around. And at the same time, another trivial issue will develop....
That's how my motorcycle went from 'needs to be kick-started' through 'sometimes it takes a few tries', through 'bump starting works though', to 'you can bump start it within 6 attempts', to 'you can bump start it within 6 attempts, as long as you didn't use the headlights too much last time you rode it'
Speaking of security through obscurity, my car is a 96 Nissan and it's had a few attempts on it. It's easy enough to steal, but it's getting hard enough for me to find replacement parts that I'd be surprised if thieves have everything, so I take some bits of the car with me if it's sitting for a while.
I have a quick release wheel to deter the average opportunist from breaking my glass and ignition barrel, and with some wiring trickery and the bits I remove it's never going to start. It's aftermarket enough that stock parts won't help the thief, so unless they have a laptop, an aftermarket ECU, and a tuner handy, they probably won't get far.
Sucks to have to bother with all that, but alarms have never helped me, and you just can't fix woeful 90s physical security.
One attempt on my car was only foiled because when I park up at my girlfriends house, I remove some 90s era fuses you can't get anymore and take the box covers with me. A paperclip would work, but you've got to figure out that the specific fuses are missing first.
It's not about being perfect when it comes to car security, it's about being too much of a pain in the ass, so they'll give up and move on. Just like bicycle security.
It's not about being perfect when it comes to car security, it's about being too much of a pain in the ass, so they'll give up and move on.
Yeah, my Dad had a Ford F-100 that had a gear shift that would come out. He drove it to work and took the gear shift inside and left it in his locker. Not the best location (a town in Oregon in the 70's), but he never had any trouble with someone stealing his ride out of the parking lot. I still remember the sound of the gas sloshing in the tank behind the seat.
Nowadays it seems just having a manual transmission is enough to deter most thieves. I once took my car to get the oil changed and I had to drive it into and out of the bay as no employee knew how.
My 83 VW T3 was attempted to be stolen once. But, like the author, my bus leaks some power. So I too installed a switch that just disconnects the battery.
It isn't hidden or super secret. Just adds extra work and time for someone probably being stressed out already.
A friends' T3 was left in the middle of the road, because her gearbox was broken-ish and finding the reverse a learned skill. Halfway through turning her bus, thieves just gave up. She found her car perpendicular to the road in the morning.
My first car was a 68 Mustang, which was a gorgeous heap of junk. At one point, the clutch just completely gave up and wedged itself in the “engaged” position. To get the car moving, I had to kill the engine, put it in 1st gear, and turn the key to run the starter. This pulled the whole car into enough motion to get the engine going, then I could synchro shift all I wanted until it came time to stop again. For that cursed month, I got very good at finding routes that didn’t involve stop lights or long lines of slow moving traffic.
I had a car where the shifter broke to the automatic transmission - it was simple enough to bypass the neutral safety switch and then I could just leave it in Drive all the time. Just had to make sure if parking to park on an incline if I wanted to be able to roll back out of the parking space.
Eventually I cut a hole in the floor and welded a shifter direct to the transmission.
On the plus side, I learned so much about how cars work that I can fix a lot of things now. My personal peak was going from “uh-oh, the alternator on the Oldsmobile died” to having replaced it with a new one from the store in 43 minutes.
Troubleshooting is a lot harder for a variety of reasons. Things are hidden away under plastic panels, the vehicles have a lot more electronics, and everything is fit into much tighter spaces.
Still, between YouTube and enthusiast forums dedicated to whatever model car it is, you can usually do a lot. Typically if something goes wrong on your car, the same thing has gone wrong to a lot of other folks with the same car and someone has posted about it.
If you're handy enough and have the right tools, an official manufacturer shop repair manual is what you really want. (Chilton is better than nothing, but you really want the manufacturer repair manual.)
But... some things are just a pain in the ass w/o a lift and the right tools. Find a good independent mechanic for older cars (easier said than done) or just take it to the local dealer for cars still under warranty.
Half the troubleshooting is being able to recognize and describe the problem in such a way that you can search for the solution. Knowing what "sluggish acceleration" is vs "RPM limited at 3k" vs "cold-start no power" is half the battle.
YouTube is substantially better than the old Chilton manuals and arguably some better than the manufacturer repair manuals (many of which assume you have an entire dealer shop's worth of tools). A number of videos (and even some of the Chilton manuals) will have variations on the process that either avoid the specialized tool (at perhaps a bit longer of a process) or a workaround that greatly simplifies the process.
My dad had a good collection of tools, and I bought a Chilton's manual from the shop. Between the two of them, I basically had a years-long shop class with illustrated instructions on doing basically any repair to a car. It was a great way to learn some engineering skills, too: once you learned how a part was meant to work, you could better reason about how to repair or replace it. Jalopy though it was, I loved learning how to fix it.
That said, although the barrier to learning is much higher now, I appreciate that our Toyota never needs any repairs of any kind. It just boringly starts and drives, every day, in all conditions.
Related to this, one of my stories about turning a car off.... I was a misguided youth rebuilding a Subaru that sat in a field for a long time. It had many problems, but overhauling the engine solved all of them (or so I had naively planned). I remember the first drive I took with it after getting plates on it. Right after filling the tank for the first time, I went to Taco Bell, bought a victory taco, and went to a parking lot to look over my city and eat. When I tried to shift into park, the cable snapped. Dejectedly, I sat and ate the taco with my foot on the brake, warming the ATF while I figured out what to do. Several factors stacked against me, including that I lived on a hill, didn't have a garage, the e-brake was rusted, and it was January in one of the snowiest areas in Michigan (3-4ft snow banks in most places). I knew the next time I flipped the car off would really count, because I would have to hot wire the NSS or fix the cable to get rolling again. Parking in the winter is a huge problem too: you will get towed or fined for getting in the way of snow removal. I ended up precariously "parking" the car in drive near my house with a combination of gravity and a snow bank. I set the ramps up, crossing my fingers that they were spaced correctly and that I would succeed in getting on them on the first try. It all worked out, and when I finally turned the car off, I felt pretty intellectually victorious.
Hah, 68 Camaro here[1]. I had the clutch linkage fail on me once in Miami Beach and managed to drive it all the way home to South Miami w/o the clutch. My recollection was that I had to push start it and managed to time all the traffic lights home so I never came to a full stop.
I can't believe you managed to do that for a month.
I was broke! That was my only option, so I did what I had to do. I lived in a much smaller city than you, though, so I didn’t have nearly the traffic to contend with.
This is one of my favorite styles of writing. I have absolutely no clue what this person is talking about and have no interest in cars, yet I read every single word.
I love when people have such a deep knowledge of something that they can write an essay as unique and thoughtful as this. It reminds me of Kitchen Confidential, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman!, or any rant about British politics by David Mitchell.
In this context (a fun blog post), I disagree. I find it to be incredibly clear when someone is playing in a world they truly understand and love.
Not to say one can't be hoodwinked from time to time, naturally, but for me it's not the "facts" that ring true. It's the joy and humor and love that is hard to fake.
A really good author could probably make this up. Some types of writing require that ability. Imagine you're writing about a fantasy world where everyone drives giant Bloops instead of cars. You might have a few chapters written from the perspective of a master Bloop mechanic. She's been fixing Bloops for as long as she can remember; she considers it her life's calling and she loves every moment of her work. The author needs to communicate that to the reader in a believable way.
But if you're not writing speculative fiction, what would be the point? It's probably harder than writing about something you know!
> A really good author could probably make this up
True, but what /really/ makes the humor in this article, when one has the domain knowledge to understand the technical details, is that every single technical humor bit is true and accurate, and brings back similar memories of similar ballets with similar vehicles from years ago.
how would anyone who's not driven vehicles that are decades beyond their design life know
I think you just need to have driven a car from that era to understand this post and believe it -- the car doesn't neccessarily need to be that old. I had a '77 Civic in 1982 and it had many of these same "features" as his Porsche - any key (or screwdriver) could open the door or turn the ignition, it had a manual choke lever installed because the automatic choke didn't work, there was an art to pumping the gas pedal before starting in cold weather (there was a fine line between being able to start and flooding it), there was no clutch interlock (or it was broken) to prevent starting the car in gear, and a bunch of other quirks similar to his.
And it was only 5 years old.
edit: And the oil use! I'd forgotten about that until reading his post, I used to carry a few jugs of oil in the trunk since the car was using almost a quart per fillup, and many gas stations kept a display case of oil out by the pumps so you could easily buy a quart if you needed it. My current 7 year old car doesn't use any noticeable amount of oil between ~8000 mile oil changes.
No clutch interlock can be useful. Had a friend growing up who’s dad would use the starter and first gear to move his Datsun out of traffic when it stopped running.
> I think you just need to have driven a car from that era to understand this post and believe it
Yes, indeed. My first car when I turned 16 was a well beaten 1971 Cadillac that had it's share of rust and the like. The author's description of the gas pedal ballet for starting his 914 reminded me of a similar situation with that old Cadillac. For a cold start, all was normal, pump once to set choke and start.
But, for a warm start, one had to hold the pedal down /just the right amount off idle/ or else it would not start up for most attempts. And of course for a semi-warm start there was a decision process of "is it cold enough to need the choke, or warm enough to only need the "slightly off idle" setting". One got a "feel" for just what to do after a bit of time with it and it became no-big-deal, but for anyone new, the whole ballet would have been a very frustrating experience.
When it finally was retired and I upgraded to a car with a fuel injected engine, and no need to touch the gas pedal for any start, hot, cold or warm, a whole era of "being in tune with the car" disappeared.
I don't disagree with you, but I'm not sure I worry about it.
The article is presented as a letter to a car thief, a preposterous proposition right up front. It is not presented as a repair guide or an "evaluate whether a 914 is worth buying" guide, so it's really only of interest for entertainment and nostalgia purposes.
There's literally zero chance I'll ever be in a conversation with someone and say aloud "Oh, Porsche owners call this Neverland," and have to worry about someone interrupting me with, "BS, I belong to a Porsche club and have never heard this nickname."
Reading this out loud is incredibly difficult. Discovered it in my Sophomore year of College, and it took my two roommates and I about 45 minutes to read through the whole thing out loud because we were laughing so hard.
It's quite fun, but anyone can pick it up in a few days if you join a few great Car forums that remain, or, ick, facebook groups and reddit groups. The discord groups are more of casual conversation and making fun of each other/new people who are trying to DIY.
The BMW car forum is good, bimmerforums.com.
Pelicanpart forum is good. BMW/Porsche
GrassrootMotorsports is good. General racing, falls back to bmw/porsche/corvette/mazda
Miata.net is fantastic.
Corvette forums are great, but I can't recall them now.
Subaru Forum is fantastic, humour though is needed. NASIOC.com
priuschat is great, though it goes quite different from above forums.
Tesla forums are good, but I can't recall any off the top of my hand.
And then landcruiser ones, wrangler/jeep ones, etc.
The more less hobby a car is, the decrease in quality in forum posts, not that a corolla is a bad car per se, or even a camry/accord. It's just, different folks for different hobbies.
Spend a week on there, and you'll learn the lingo (it's universal throughout cars, especially per car generation/period, 70's/80's/90's,etc)
Then you also have other motorsports too, motorcycles and even planes, which share the same sentiment. Pilot chat/bicker is very similar. ;)
This is all true, but one needs to be aware that these forums are also chock full of "forum folklore". You'll get all kinds of advice and lecturing which is driven by what has been posted before rather than what matches reality.
Mixing DOT-5 brake fluid with DOT-3/4 is always a fun one. Folklore is that it will poison children and kill puppies. Reality is that they are, by law, compatible and mixing won't do anything more than create a fluid with unknown boiling points, but this is true of mixing any two brake fluids (and it is true DOT-5 is not compatible with ABS brake systems, but that's a separate point).
Pretty much anything to do with turbos is another fun one, as many folks have no idea how turbos work but have lots of opinions on tuning them.
Anyway, the point is that the comradery is great on these forums, they're a lot of fun, and you can find good info, but don't take any info on them as gospel.
On the flip side, I know a ton about cars and actually own a german sports car of roughly this vintage and this rings incredibly true (and also hilarious). My car can't be locked due to fear of it never opening again, starting the engine requires a delicate balance of the right amount of throttle and prayers the battery has enough charge, and selecting first is a preposterous mixture of a delicate ballet and sledgehammering it home.
The fact this essay works for someone with limited domain knowledge and someone with lots is a testament to the quality of writing.
Easily my favorite essay of the year. Unique, informative and casual in the way sitting around a table listening to an engaging guest tell tales and the visualization works immediately. Count me among the fans of this piece and author.
On the actual flip side, there are plenty of people who properly maintain vintage sports cars instead of just talking about how much they know about them.
I get that door handles and lock cylinders are often made of easily-broken pot metal, but most owner communities have figured out solutions, or just live a little and recognize that a locksmith can easily get you into almost any vintage car if necessary.
The starting problems mean your engine is poorly tuned/maintained, battery issues are bad wiring or undiagnosed parasitic drain (or just buy a battery maintainer, dude), and thinking "my first gear syncro is worn or my shift linkage isn't properly adjusted, I should mash the shit out of it" are purely owner error / strongly counter-indicate "I know a ton about cars."
Hahaha, even on old muscle cars with good parts availability, and only 4 moving parts in the first place, something is virtually always broken. Keeping a german car of this era functioning is a sisyphean task.
I think a faculty at a Motorsports Engineering School probably knows how to maintain vintage sports cars. Just because they own the car does not mean they need to maintain it.
I think this guy's bona-fides are pretty solid, though:
> Norman Garrett was the Concept Engineer for the original Miata back in his days at Mazda’s Southern California Design Studio. He currently teaches automotive engineering classes at UNC-C’s Motorsports Engineering Department in Charlotte, North Carolina and curates his small collection of dysfunctional automobiles and motorcycles.
I imagine some of this was written tongue-in-cheek: the problems are probably not as bad as described, and/or the problems are things that have been wrong with the car at some point, but have mostly been fixed, and he's writing about it as if all the problems exist at once for entertainment value.
Or it's all true as it is, and that's just life, because people don't always have 100 spare hours to fix all the problems present on a car of that age. Maybe you do (how lucky for you!), but it's a bit uncharitable to throw shade at someone else.
I agree. I imagine a lot of this is hyperbole rooted in truth. As I have gotten older and had more of an interest in doing my own wrenching I realize half the battle is having the right tools for the job. In most cases that means a good way to lift your vehicle (would love a real lift in my garage) and the appropriate tools to remove or reinstall various items in the car. Having this can mean the difference between a nightmare or relatively easy job. Of course all bets are off if you live where they salt roads in the winter.
Edit. Also not being afraid to remove any and all panels required to access something also helps tremendously. So If you own an Audi be prepared to remove the front clip of the car. Google Audi service position for the hairy details.
But I think hobbyist vintage wrenching shares a lot with software feature design: you could do anything, but the real objective is to maximize fun-per-time-spent. Otherwise, you're working another full time job as a professional mechanic for your cars.
And besides, there's something elegant about getting a rat rod to work. :-)
The locks are stupidly expensive, like $1000 a door. I'd rather just not lock it. The starting issues are due to the carb needing a rebuild. It's on my list, but there are bigger fish to fry. The battery is due to it being a former race car with a tiny, super light battery. It's only designed to crank the engine a few times before it's dead to save weight. 1st gear in non-syncro, so it's for sure not that. It's likely the linkage, but that's a big job and won't be worth doing for a few years along with a few other things at the same time.
It's a cheap vintage car that isn't worth spending any real money on. I could pour $40,000 into getting into concours shape, but it would only add 2-3 grand worth of value. Instead I drive and enjoy it.
Good to see there other vintage cars, dare I say, lovers out there that see things that way. Mine is a 1982 Range Rover, bought like almost 4 years ago before people started to ask absurd prices for those.
It's leaking oil from the oil cooler thermostat, the gearbox and started a while ago leaking from the transmission break. Oh, and the rear diff pinion is leaking, too. The 3.5 l V8, basically a Buick 215 allumium small block running on dual carbs, needs some gentle treatment before firing up. It usually does, a slight carb rebuild and calibrating really helped. The gearbox is more suited to a tractor and has all of four gears. The rear windows don't work and the upper tailgate doesn't close on its lock but uses two outside locks on each side.
It is rust free so, noise levels are acceptable below 110 km/h and she's a beast off road. Yes, I drive her in the intended environment, regularly.
I have hopes to get her finally done in the next 1, 2 years. And I love this rolling restauration thing. Only was close to selling her once, until I figured out I reassembled the choke wrong and drove fuel consumption up to 30 l per 100 km.
Regarding the door locks, I live in a part of a city where some owners of older cars keep their doors unlocked so thieves won't break a window getting in.
Norman Garrett was the Concept Engineer for the original Miata back in his days at Mazda’s Southern California Design Studio. He currently teaches automotive engineering classes at UNC-C’s Motorsports Engineering Department in Charlotte, North Carolina and curates his small collection of dysfunctional automobiles and motorcycles.
I'm fairly certain that he knows how to 'fix stuff'
> selecting first is a preposterous mixture of a delicate ballet and sledgehammering it home.
Double declutching is a lost art, it seems.
It involved moving the shifter into neutral, revving the engine still in neutral, and clutching and shifting into the gear when the RPMs were "right". Skilled double-declutchers could shift nearly as quickly as ordinary drivers with syncromesh.
Common in older cars when I was young, in the proterozoic.
I certainly have to double clutch to go down into first since it doesn't have a syncro, but that's a pretty rare need. Even selecting first from neutral while stationary is a challenge.
When I was 14, a family friend from church decided he needed help around his sizable property. He figured the easiest approach would be to teach me to operate his machinery and come over on weekends to work with him. He got brush cleared and I learned to operate, among other things, a farm tractor from the 1950s. I learned the combination of finesse, force, swearing, and prayer needed to shift such a beast. When I started driving my first car, an old Buick Century with an automatic, it almost felt like cheating.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 313 ms ] threadAmazing the breadth of preconceived notions that can be leveraged with a badge on a grill. Having the presence of mind and ability to leverage readership demographics like this is what really separates good writers and editors from the mediocre.
A better comparison to the Porsche 914 would be an MG roadster - or if you want to stick with Chrysler, then a Dodge Omni GLH. By modern standards both of these are unreliable, uncomfortable, and hard to drive, but like the 914 they are celebrated by enthusiasts. Part of the reason is because despite their flaws, and despite being relatively hard to drive, they reward skill. While slow to accelerate, they handle well - allowing a skilled driver to make good lap times on a track.
① it was '83, not '85 (and thus air-cooled);
② it was an aftermarket camper van conversion with some slight design issues in the pop top, not a Westfalia;
③ after I rebuilt the engine a second time we sold it, so, blessedly, it's not mine anymore. My engine rebuild survived for a couple of years until the new owner drove it in second gear for an hour at highway speeds, overheating the engine to the point where it punched a pushrod through the crankcase.
|–|–|
①③④
Huh HN lets me approximate the shift pattern of a deuce.5
I remember one guy who would always show up in a Porsche 914 with racing tires, and he would run circles around us amateurs.
I knew a guy that was an incredible mountain biker, won all the races he entered etc. He used to show up with crappy bikes probably 10lbs heavier than everyone else... he'd still win. Sometimes you either have it or you don't, and all the equipment in the world won't help you.
Great read.
What do MOTs say about antique cars? I've had some really rough old Minis pass the MOT in the past.
At some point the solenoid died (or some other electrical component). So to start it, you'd have to reach under the car with a screwdriver (or some other piece of metal, but I kept a screwdriver in the car for this purpose), and short out across two terminals.
You then had 10-20 seconds to get out from under the car, into the driver's seat, and turn the key. As a practiced manouver, it was pretty quick.
Now that I've finally got a reliable car and the money for the $20 solenoid we have a saying about cars in general:
Used to have the time but no money, now got the money but no time.
Contemporary GM solenoids were integrated into the starter motor and were a real pain to get to. Certainly not impossible to do the screwdriver trick but far less convenient with needing to crawl around on the ground and all. Being located right next to the exhaust headers also meant they were easily susceptible to heat soak problems which would cause a failure to activate - especially if you have a hot-running high performance engine. It was actually a pretty common and easy mod on those GMs to use a Ford solenoid and bypass the one on the starter motor.
I still like to casually drop "oh yeah, I used to have a Porsche back when I was 16." Although I must say it was in immeasurably better shape than this one :D
I still dream of finding an old 914 and giving it an electric conversion… I'd have to do something about that rear window, though, it whips air forward when you drive with the top down.
(It was also my first experience with an interference engine, and the terror of having your timing belt break.)
1: Car blew clean as a whistle, even to clean air standards that never existed in 1986, but since the intake and exhaust had all sorts of parts not officially stamped with the CA bureaucracy seal of approval, it had to go :(
The combination of an interference engine and a super-long manually tensioned timing belt was rather unfortunate though. I never had an issue with my belt, but adjusting the tension was very stressful. Especially since I was too cheap to buy the proper expensive tool and was using one of the crappy "cricket" ones.
I still want to buy a later model 90s one, throw an LS7 in there, and overhaul the interior. Would be an amazing vehicle.
It was one of the potential follow up projects, once the first one is done. That will take at least another two years... And I won't get permission for another project car in our drive way!
When I got it there were issues. I have worked through many of them. The PO did not understand the regulator for instance. I gutted the wiring and redid it. It now charges and there is no battery drain.
Like OP the lights were not good. I replaced those with LEDs. The suspension was worn, it was completely replaced.
The engine has good compression and the leak down showed it was healthy. It did leak oil though, sealed the engine. It no longer leaks.
You can’t just buy one of these cars and drive it. You have to wrench on it. It takes care and feeding.
I find it rewarding
I assume that at this point there are enough wrecks of Model S/X/3/Y that you should be able to pick up electric motors from them at junkyards.
The thing I really worry about with electric swaps is battery. You could have a Note 7 situation on your hands _real easy_ if you're not careful.
[1] https://performanceparts.ford.com/part/M-9000-MACHE
Safely installing/modding/repairing automotive fuel systems is likely just as, if not more, dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. There are few interlocks on automotive fuel systems beyond "if the engine stops spinning, turn off the fuel pump" or in some vehicles, there might be a crash/rollover fuel shutoff switch.
People think working on EVs is super scary when reality is that you can usually pull a cover in the rear passenger area, find and pull a bright orange plug, and the HV system is rendered completely safe. EVs don't have a billion places you can scald or burn yourself, their "engine" compartments generally don't have much or any spinning objects that could deglove your hands, there's no fuel or oil to catch fire, no high pressure hydraulics...
I and acquaintances in my hobby have dealt with them a lot, very great site.
Eh? I literally got a brand new electric VW e-Up last week, it's exactly that. It even still has analog dials, and VW provides a mount for your phone instead of an "infotainment" system. The height of sophistication is DAB radio and heated front window and seats.
I highly recommend it, it's a hoot - and with 150 miles range and rapid charging capability it's more than enough for all my needs.
That's the dashboard in it, it's as "bare minimum" as it gets: https://media.drivingelectric.com/image/private/s--7PGbPUr6-...
I know this because a friend worked for a company trying to monetize that data for weather forecasting.
If you want to disable this nonsense, just unplug the cellular antenna and connect it to a dummy load.
Is this just a usa thing?
Companies like EV West in California and Swindon in the UK offer bolt-in kits for 1960s cars, in particular the VW Beetle and the original Cooper Mini
Long term, as engine parts become harder to source, especially for low volume european cars, Electric Conversion is rapidly becoming the accepted way to keep these classics on the road for another 100 years.
[0] https://scatvw.com/product/2-0-liter-long-block-24-875-779/
[1] https://www.jegs.com/i/Chevrolet-Performance/809/19421057/10...
I have a similarly size/weight prewar french car, and when the engine finally gives out, will probably pull out the petrol engine and swap in a VW kit, but with a custom bell housing adapter. A 70-100hp electric motor meant for a VW is not a lot of power, but can provide enough low end torque to keep the car driving in modern traffic for 100-130 miles, which is probably enough for the use classic cars get.
Unfortunately, though you might find one with a smaller screen, you won't find ANY new car with no screen these days -- backup cameras (and, by implication, a screen to see its feed) have been required on new cars in the US since 2018.
Being an automotive engineer that worked for Tesla seems to be helpful, though.
But like all car projects it’s a money pit. Expect to spend $50k in parts and labor. And it may or may not be street legal for that price.
Driving the vehicle in places where you don’t have cell service or where it can be cold would be a bad idea if the conversion breaks down. Or just get a satellite phone and AAA.
I'm currently working on converting a Mazda RX-8.
https://www.electricclassiccars.co.uk
I also design a variety of parts for adapting oem ev parts for other vehicles www.bratindustries.net
Like take a stock Tesla, throw out the computer it comes with and replace it with one that doesn't spy on you. Keep everything else.
Probably easier than doing the reverse, isn't it?
Not with Teslas specifically; I think surveillance is woven so deep into the fabric of the vehicle, it'd be a lot of work to get it out. But with most other makes, it's just a telematics unit that's easy enough to remove or bypass, and most of the other functionality just keeps working.
How would one price such a service? Often the research is 99% of the work, and the actual labor is just pulling a connector or two, perhaps fabricating a short bypass harness.
- The monitor is necessary but it is not a touch screen and it comes with a nice clicky knob to control it. Plus you can make shortcuts to go to certain screens with the radio station buttons.
- 2014 - 2017? all shipped with a 3g module that is now unsupported and not working.
- You can get access to munros teardown report for $10(1), and if you know where to look ;) you can find the service tech training manuals and their repair instructions for free which are all very detailed.
- realoem.com has exploded parts diagrams with part numbers for everything.
The only negatives really is:
- buying OEM parts comes with that BMW price premium and the dealer will 100% rip you off if you ever take it to them for repairs.
- The OEM tires, the only kind that fit on the OEM wheels, have terrible tread life.
(1)https://munrolive.com/support-%2F-store/ols/products/bmw-i3-...
Rebuilt one at 16 and took it to college!
A vulnerability shared with all K-Jetronic engines. At some point I got clued in and kept a fire extinguisher on board my own 914, just in case. And it saw use, not on my own car, but doing damage control on a stranger's VW Beetle, in flames on the freeway shoulder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_914
This will summon the ancient, exhausted hamster that powers the vehicle.
It was a really fun car to drive although it also shared many of the same quirks as mentioned in this story.
There was a six cylinder version of this as well (super rare) and they made a prototype 914/8 which was never offered for sale, afaik only two were made (one for Ferdinand Porsche, one for Ferdinand Piëch).
https://web.archive.org/web/20220401144722/https://www.hager...
Once you had driven it for a while you got to know the "feel" of it and had no problems, but like in the article someone new to driving it would have had a really hard time lol.
Does it begin with J and end with Y? (I'm a London-based bean!)
Left my MGB in the dust, of course
There's no snow where I live, so these beautiful old heaps can stay on the road far longer than is healthy.
The fact that you start your comment with "in the US" when anyone even slightly familiar with the place knows that pretty much everything about it is a state by state deal is a massive red flag for a comment that serves no purpose but to convert pearl clutching into internet virtue points. The fact that you end your comment with a back handed quip deriding some imagined notion of freedom more or less confirms it.
https://www.ncdot.gov/dmv/title-registration/emissions-safet...
There's also an emissions inspection that varies by county, but vehicles older than 20 years are exempt.
https://www.ncdot.gov/dmv/title-registration/emissions-safet...
Does it make any sense to exempt older vehicles that are most likely to fail these inspections? No, of course it doesn't.
New vehicles within the most recent 3 model years are also exempt.
This hardly matters though because you don't need to register the vehicle in the state you're living in.
NC: Within 60 days of establishing a permanent residence in North Carolina, new residents who plan to operate a motor vehicle must get a North Carolina driver license and title and register their vehicles with the N.C. Division of Motor Vehicles.
https://www.ncdot.gov/dmv/help/moving/Pages/new-residents.as...
GA: If you own or lease a vehicle in Georgia, you must register it with the state. [...] New residents should register their vehicle no more than 30 days from the date they move to Georgia.
https://georgia.gov/register-vehicle
FL: When you move to Florida and become a resident you have 10 days to register your out of state vehicle.
https://www.dmvflorida.org/vehicles/out-of-state-car-registr...
CA: Once you officially establish residency in California, you will have 20 days to register your vehicle with the DMV to avoid late fees.
https://frontdoor.ucdavis.edu/relocation/car
Might be illegal in some cases. Too risky to be worth it? Not at all. Just look at where most supercars are registered.
Just don't name your company $firstname $lastname LLC.
You went off on a tangent saying that you don't have to register a vehicle in the state you're in. You do in NC, as well as other states I'm familiar with.
You're now suggesting ways to evade the registration requirement, which may be illegal. This is in no way a rebuttal to the registration and safety inspection requirements that were being asked about at the top of this thread. Exploiting a loophole - including potentially breaking the law - to avoid a requirement doesn’t get rid of the requirement.
More programs should be run like that. Set a goal, create a program, then periodically evaluate if the goal is still the same and if the program is effective.
Except Maryland, none of the states I've done an inspection looked inside the vehicle. The states that did emissions would fail if check engine light is on, but if you disconnect the battery right before to reset it then they might pass it.
Any kind of policing is self-denying. You can't evaluate it while it's being applied.
The state strongly encouraged me to send it to a Golden Shield mechanic. As part of the work, they "checked" the air intake filter and MAF sensor on the engine, which was, of course, filthy. It sits in a big plastic box on that car. Instead of reinstalling the filter, they jammed it in sideways and closed the box. I figured it out later, and spent about an hour picking bits of leaves out of the downstream air intake.
Of course, this cost 95% of the limit past which California gives you a free pass till the next smog inspection. (And almost 2x the market value of the car.)
I'm convinced the whole thing is a make-work program that's holding our air quality hostage. (And I'm strongly for tightening emissions standards!)
My state on the other coast does (or used to) openly admit in the official training slides for the inspection license that the reason they have safety inspections is so that holding a state inspection license (they do a single license that covers both emissions and safety) is lucrative and therefore license holders have a financial incentive not to fudge emissions inspections.
Pretty much every business who is supplied a customer base by force of law gives the quality of service you describe.
I was confused by this until I searched for "Porsche 914 shift pattern" on Google Images. I guess it's a dog-leg gearbox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-leg_gearbox).
HN supports shift pattern unicode!
Ⓡ②⑤
|–|–|
①③④
Also, odd, but the Citroen M35 has a similar name and shift pattern, even though it's a car and completely unrelated.
https://ranwhenparkeddotnet.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/m352...
One rail is 1st/reverse. Another rail is 2nd/3rd and the last rail is 4th or OD and direct. Whether the "fore is a lower gear than aft" holds between the 2nd and 3rd rails is a function of whether or not it's a the pair of gears that constitute "forward gear on the right rail) will either be greater or less than 1:1 depending on if it's an overdrive transmission whereas the rear position on the right rail will always be direct for reasons that boil down to "that's the sensible way to build it".
There's not much to "figure out" when you have a direct lever that goes into the shifter.
The Deuce doesn't even have synchronizers, you're expected to double clutch and handle that part yourself.
I accidentally shifted from 1st straight into 5th quite a few times. The darn thing had so much torque that it wouldn’t even stall when you did that!
They should have had a throwaway scene where he tries to steal a Deuce from an armory and it comes up, "File Not Found."
Or he's throwing errors and has to reboot himself trying to find 4th.
One thing I don't see mentioned is that you first have to press down onto the knob, then shift forward, in order to shift the transmission into R. Simply pushing the knob forward won't go from N to R.
On my old Jetta (left hand drive), it was more like "Up and to the Left a little bit", and not a straight throw from first.
So I’m guessing this was one of the standard gear patterns in the late 70s / early 80s euros, back when car affordances were often nebulous concepts.
Definitely burned out a clutch early from learning to drive and learning to drive stick at the same time, but damn do I miss it sometimes.
"Standard?" Hmm. We have two cars with manual transmission, a VW Sharan and a VW Up:
The Sharan has R at the top left, then (reading across) 1 3 5 with 2 4 6 below; so 6th is at the bottom right.
The Up only has 5 forward gears, but for some reason they decided to put R at the bottom right (so down from 5th... you can probably see where this story is going)
I have once, and only once, been driving along at motorway speed in the Up, in 5th, and briefly thought I was in the Sharan, and started trying to change up to 6th, except the Up only has 5, and you're heading for R, not 6th. Happily I didn't complete the change...
Reverse in the bottom right is the “normal” 5-speed reverse spot no?
I've driven a lot of 5-speed manual transmission rental cars over the decades, and my impression is that reverse in the top left is (or certainly was) the far more common layout:
Our previous car, also a VW, had this layout too.To get into reverse there's a gear stick collar to pull up.
I learned this driving my first car which was a similar vintage Karmann Ghia. It still did it out of habit twenty years later driving my stick-shift Jetta. The second YouTube video I found of someone learning to drive a KG was doing it instinctively as well. [1] I guess there's so much play you just learn to wig-wag a little to see if you're in gear or not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF77y8IVi8k
My 77 Firebird has aftermarket shift and throttle cables.
Of course, my Firebird is an automatic, so who knows. Maybe a two cable system would do?
That is in part a secondary effect of how wide and crisp the offsets are between gears (how 'deep' the H shape is). On the gear boxes people tend to like, going from 2nd to 3rd, and 3rd to 4th take very close to the same time. On my little roadster I'd just stomp on the clutch and throw the gear knob in the general vicinity of where it needed to be, relying on hand-eye coordination and the synchros to do the real work (I missed maybe 3 shifts a year, and half of those when I was tired).
Compare this to the car I learned stick on - the infamous Chevy Citation, made during the nadir of Detroit - where the gearbox was roughly shaped like an X, although at the time it felt like an l. I lost track of how many times I accidentally upshifted instead of downshifted at a stop sign, and that engine had less torque than an electric pencil sharpener, so the engine would simple stall the moment I tried to let the clutch out.
The roadster I subsequently drove, I experimented and found that if I was even a little careful I could get moving from a dead stop in 3rd gear. Basically a modified tractor engine. All torque, no horsepower.
The 1->4 mistake OTOH, having drifted a little too far right in Neverland, was easily fallen into, and the shuddering deceleration that follows may have been the cause of a few rear-end collisions over the years.
1 2
R 3
edit: just got to the author’s blurb at the bottom. He was an engineer on the original Miata, so it’s no surprise that he knows what he’s talking about.
The fact that they are dog slow is made up by the fact that your sitting on this little motor making a huge racket. Its the "I must be going fast, given how much noise i'm hearing" thing.
Several rabbit-holes in Linux have tested my patience less than that
You buy it with a trivial occasional issue that can be worked around, and the issue gradually starts happening more and more often and getting harder and harder to work around. And at the same time, another trivial issue will develop....
That's how my motorcycle went from 'needs to be kick-started' through 'sometimes it takes a few tries', through 'bump starting works though', to 'you can bump start it within 6 attempts', to 'you can bump start it within 6 attempts, as long as you didn't use the headlights too much last time you rode it'
I have a quick release wheel to deter the average opportunist from breaking my glass and ignition barrel, and with some wiring trickery and the bits I remove it's never going to start. It's aftermarket enough that stock parts won't help the thief, so unless they have a laptop, an aftermarket ECU, and a tuner handy, they probably won't get far.
Sucks to have to bother with all that, but alarms have never helped me, and you just can't fix woeful 90s physical security.
One attempt on my car was only foiled because when I park up at my girlfriends house, I remove some 90s era fuses you can't get anymore and take the box covers with me. A paperclip would work, but you've got to figure out that the specific fuses are missing first.
It's not about being perfect when it comes to car security, it's about being too much of a pain in the ass, so they'll give up and move on. Just like bicycle security.
Yeah, my Dad had a Ford F-100 that had a gear shift that would come out. He drove it to work and took the gear shift inside and left it in his locker. Not the best location (a town in Oregon in the 70's), but he never had any trouble with someone stealing his ride out of the parking lot. I still remember the sound of the gas sloshing in the tank behind the seat.
It isn't hidden or super secret. Just adds extra work and time for someone probably being stressed out already.
A friends' T3 was left in the middle of the road, because her gearbox was broken-ish and finding the reverse a learned skill. Halfway through turning her bus, thieves just gave up. She found her car perpendicular to the road in the morning.
Eventually I cut a hole in the floor and welded a shifter direct to the transmission.
On the plus side, I learned so much about how cars work that I can fix a lot of things now. My personal peak was going from “uh-oh, the alternator on the Oldsmobile died” to having replaced it with a new one from the store in 43 minutes.
New cars are substantially more reliable, but that same troubleshooting can be helpful but somewhat harder to learn I feel.
Still, between YouTube and enthusiast forums dedicated to whatever model car it is, you can usually do a lot. Typically if something goes wrong on your car, the same thing has gone wrong to a lot of other folks with the same car and someone has posted about it.
If you're handy enough and have the right tools, an official manufacturer shop repair manual is what you really want. (Chilton is better than nothing, but you really want the manufacturer repair manual.)
But... some things are just a pain in the ass w/o a lift and the right tools. Find a good independent mechanic for older cars (easier said than done) or just take it to the local dealer for cars still under warranty.
YouTube is substantially better than the old Chilton manuals and arguably some better than the manufacturer repair manuals (many of which assume you have an entire dealer shop's worth of tools). A number of videos (and even some of the Chilton manuals) will have variations on the process that either avoid the specialized tool (at perhaps a bit longer of a process) or a workaround that greatly simplifies the process.
That said, although the barrier to learning is much higher now, I appreciate that our Toyota never needs any repairs of any kind. It just boringly starts and drives, every day, in all conditions.
I can't believe you managed to do that for a month.
1. https://ibb.co/CMW3SdS (I sold it over a decade ago.)
Dopey young me with the car: https://imgur.com/a/hbRLpO2
I love when people have such a deep knowledge of something that they can write an essay as unique and thoughtful as this. It reminds me of Kitchen Confidential, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman!, or any rant about British politics by David Mitchell.
The author could be bullshitting (he's not) but how would anyone who's not driven vehicles that are decades beyond their design life know?
Not to say one can't be hoodwinked from time to time, naturally, but for me it's not the "facts" that ring true. It's the joy and humor and love that is hard to fake.
But if you're not writing speculative fiction, what would be the point? It's probably harder than writing about something you know!
True, but what /really/ makes the humor in this article, when one has the domain knowledge to understand the technical details, is that every single technical humor bit is true and accurate, and brings back similar memories of similar ballets with similar vehicles from years ago.
Ergo, I think what throwaway0a5e said above has a lot of merit, even if I wouldn't have stated it in in such absolutest terms:
> Depth of knowledge is impossible to assess for anyone that doesn't have similar depth in the same subject matter.
I think you just need to have driven a car from that era to understand this post and believe it -- the car doesn't neccessarily need to be that old. I had a '77 Civic in 1982 and it had many of these same "features" as his Porsche - any key (or screwdriver) could open the door or turn the ignition, it had a manual choke lever installed because the automatic choke didn't work, there was an art to pumping the gas pedal before starting in cold weather (there was a fine line between being able to start and flooding it), there was no clutch interlock (or it was broken) to prevent starting the car in gear, and a bunch of other quirks similar to his.
And it was only 5 years old.
edit: And the oil use! I'd forgotten about that until reading his post, I used to carry a few jugs of oil in the trunk since the car was using almost a quart per fillup, and many gas stations kept a display case of oil out by the pumps so you could easily buy a quart if you needed it. My current 7 year old car doesn't use any noticeable amount of oil between ~8000 mile oil changes.
Yes, indeed. My first car when I turned 16 was a well beaten 1971 Cadillac that had it's share of rust and the like. The author's description of the gas pedal ballet for starting his 914 reminded me of a similar situation with that old Cadillac. For a cold start, all was normal, pump once to set choke and start.
But, for a warm start, one had to hold the pedal down /just the right amount off idle/ or else it would not start up for most attempts. And of course for a semi-warm start there was a decision process of "is it cold enough to need the choke, or warm enough to only need the "slightly off idle" setting". One got a "feel" for just what to do after a bit of time with it and it became no-big-deal, but for anyone new, the whole ballet would have been a very frustrating experience.
When it finally was retired and I upgraded to a car with a fuel injected engine, and no need to touch the gas pedal for any start, hot, cold or warm, a whole era of "being in tune with the car" disappeared.
The article is presented as a letter to a car thief, a preposterous proposition right up front. It is not presented as a repair guide or an "evaluate whether a 914 is worth buying" guide, so it's really only of interest for entertainment and nostalgia purposes.
There's literally zero chance I'll ever be in a conversation with someone and say aloud "Oh, Porsche owners call this Neverland," and have to worry about someone interrupting me with, "BS, I belong to a Porsche club and have never heard this nickname."
By trusting someone who has. Either trust a specific person or believe there is someone in the crowd who would say something.
I was about to write more or less the same thing. I can barely drive and never owned a car, but this article was beautiful.
I can't find the original, but the copy there is exactly what I remembered.
The BMW car forum is good, bimmerforums.com. Pelicanpart forum is good. BMW/Porsche GrassrootMotorsports is good. General racing, falls back to bmw/porsche/corvette/mazda Miata.net is fantastic. Corvette forums are great, but I can't recall them now. Subaru Forum is fantastic, humour though is needed. NASIOC.com priuschat is great, though it goes quite different from above forums. Tesla forums are good, but I can't recall any off the top of my hand. And then landcruiser ones, wrangler/jeep ones, etc.
The more less hobby a car is, the decrease in quality in forum posts, not that a corolla is a bad car per se, or even a camry/accord. It's just, different folks for different hobbies.
Spend a week on there, and you'll learn the lingo (it's universal throughout cars, especially per car generation/period, 70's/80's/90's,etc)
Then you also have other motorsports too, motorcycles and even planes, which share the same sentiment. Pilot chat/bicker is very similar. ;)
Mixing DOT-5 brake fluid with DOT-3/4 is always a fun one. Folklore is that it will poison children and kill puppies. Reality is that they are, by law, compatible and mixing won't do anything more than create a fluid with unknown boiling points, but this is true of mixing any two brake fluids (and it is true DOT-5 is not compatible with ABS brake systems, but that's a separate point).
Pretty much anything to do with turbos is another fun one, as many folks have no idea how turbos work but have lots of opinions on tuning them.
Anyway, the point is that the comradery is great on these forums, they're a lot of fun, and you can find good info, but don't take any info on them as gospel.
The fact this essay works for someone with limited domain knowledge and someone with lots is a testament to the quality of writing.
I get that door handles and lock cylinders are often made of easily-broken pot metal, but most owner communities have figured out solutions, or just live a little and recognize that a locksmith can easily get you into almost any vintage car if necessary.
The starting problems mean your engine is poorly tuned/maintained, battery issues are bad wiring or undiagnosed parasitic drain (or just buy a battery maintainer, dude), and thinking "my first gear syncro is worn or my shift linkage isn't properly adjusted, I should mash the shit out of it" are purely owner error / strongly counter-indicate "I know a ton about cars."
This is also a humor article.
> Norman Garrett was the Concept Engineer for the original Miata back in his days at Mazda’s Southern California Design Studio. He currently teaches automotive engineering classes at UNC-C’s Motorsports Engineering Department in Charlotte, North Carolina and curates his small collection of dysfunctional automobiles and motorcycles.
I imagine some of this was written tongue-in-cheek: the problems are probably not as bad as described, and/or the problems are things that have been wrong with the car at some point, but have mostly been fixed, and he's writing about it as if all the problems exist at once for entertainment value.
Or it's all true as it is, and that's just life, because people don't always have 100 spare hours to fix all the problems present on a car of that age. Maybe you do (how lucky for you!), but it's a bit uncharitable to throw shade at someone else.
Edit. Also not being afraid to remove any and all panels required to access something also helps tremendously. So If you own an Audi be prepared to remove the front clip of the car. Google Audi service position for the hairy details.
But I think hobbyist vintage wrenching shares a lot with software feature design: you could do anything, but the real objective is to maximize fun-per-time-spent. Otherwise, you're working another full time job as a professional mechanic for your cars.
And besides, there's something elegant about getting a rat rod to work. :-)
It's a cheap vintage car that isn't worth spending any real money on. I could pour $40,000 into getting into concours shape, but it would only add 2-3 grand worth of value. Instead I drive and enjoy it.
It's leaking oil from the oil cooler thermostat, the gearbox and started a while ago leaking from the transmission break. Oh, and the rear diff pinion is leaking, too. The 3.5 l V8, basically a Buick 215 allumium small block running on dual carbs, needs some gentle treatment before firing up. It usually does, a slight carb rebuild and calibrating really helped. The gearbox is more suited to a tractor and has all of four gears. The rear windows don't work and the upper tailgate doesn't close on its lock but uses two outside locks on each side.
It is rust free so, noise levels are acceptable below 110 km/h and she's a beast off road. Yes, I drive her in the intended environment, regularly.
I have hopes to get her finally done in the next 1, 2 years. And I love this rolling restauration thing. Only was close to selling her once, until I figured out I reassembled the choke wrong and drove fuel consumption up to 30 l per 100 km.
Norman Garrett was the Concept Engineer for the original Miata back in his days at Mazda’s Southern California Design Studio. He currently teaches automotive engineering classes at UNC-C’s Motorsports Engineering Department in Charlotte, North Carolina and curates his small collection of dysfunctional automobiles and motorcycles.
I'm fairly certain that he knows how to 'fix stuff'
Double declutching is a lost art, it seems.
It involved moving the shifter into neutral, revving the engine still in neutral, and clutching and shifting into the gear when the RPMs were "right". Skilled double-declutchers could shift nearly as quickly as ordinary drivers with syncromesh.
Common in older cars when I was young, in the proterozoic.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_clutch_(technique)
> Norman Garrett was the Concept Engineer for the original Miata back in his days at Mazda’s Southern California Design Studio