So, with the engine and transmission built, I moved them out of the way, covering them with a sheet and wheeled the body into my shop. This will be a total rebuild. By the time I'm done, I will have degreased, media blasted or replaced every single part on this car.

Although the body needs rust repair in several spots, generally its in good shape. The previous owner gave it a very poor paint job, tho - one of those where you just put masking tape over the bare minimum and give it a quick spray w/o much prep work. So, I need to strip all the paint down to the bare metal and cut out the rusted sheet metal and weld in new panels. To do this, the car must be completely disassembled. Interior, suspension, everything off. The easiest way to do this is by putting the car up on a rotisserie. A rotisserie, just like the one you use on your BBQ, attaches to the front and rear of the car, suspending it in air allowing you to rotate the car freely.

So, after removing the interior of the car, I welded together a rotisserie for it. Once up on the rotisserie, it was easy to flip it over and remove all the brakes, suspension, steering et cetera. All that's left now is the bare chassis.

That was about where I got to by the end of the summer. A couple other things took up my free time over the summer that slowed things down (building a shed, helping Anna paint the house). Since then, I've repaired the rust on the chassis by cutting out the rusted parts and welding in parts cut from cars that were being stripped.

I have now moved the chassis out of my shop and have it bundled up for the winter. I've lined up a guy who is going to sandblast the chassis, but I'm not sure if I'll do that this winter as I need to be able to prime it immediately after stripping the paint, and I'm not sure if I want to do that in my shop in the winter. Its difficult to get good ventilation in my shop for painting - I can do the epoxy priming outside next spring/summer.

But, I have all the suspension/brakes/steering parts to refinish this winter. Lots of media blasting and painting that should keep me busy.

That's the update.

Since I added this blog as one of my websites on Facebook, I thought I should at least put a post up to say what I've been doing. I see my last post was dated over a year ago!

Ok, so last year I wrote two applications - iPodifier and AnalogWhole. iPodifier is used to automatically convert TV content for the iPod, and AnalogWhole can be used to remove DRM from music. Both apps are doing ok now. I do absolutely nothing with AnalogWhole now. The program works and gets downloaded a lot, but after the online help forum for it got overloaded with spam, I gave up trying to keep it clean. iPodifier is doing great and I regularly monitor its online forum to help out users. There are some things I should update in iPodifier, but it seems to be working fairly well, so I'm not touching it.

Last fall, I found I was spending way too much time in front of a computer, so I began to look around for a more hands-on project. I hadn't done anything really mechanical since rebuilding my motorcycles a couple years back (Kawasaki GPz-750 and a ZX-11). I remembered reading an article some time back about a guy who rebuilt a Porsche 911. I did a bit of research and found that there is a great online community around the Porsche 911. Also, 911's have been appreciating in price nicely, so it looked like the effort put into rebuilding one could be realized if I wanted to sell it.

I began looking around for a distressed 911 for cheap and after about a month of searching, found on in Concord, New Hampshire. The guy selling it was a bit shady and had had the 911 up on ebay. His ebay ad had very little info, and a pic of the car from a deceiving angle that made it look pretty good. The car sold to a guy from Germany, but b/c he didn't have a title for the car (not req'd in NH), the guy from Germany couldn't import it, so the deal fell thru. I went to see the car and found that it had some pretty severe rust on it, and the engine/transmission was pulled out and sitting beside it with only a flimsy tarp doing little to protect it from the elements.

Perfect - a real basket case that I could get for a good price. So, here's the car as I purchased it. Anthony and I dragged it home on with car dolly. There were no real surprises - it was in tough shape, but everything was there and I got it for a very good price.

I covered the car with a tarp and pulled the engine/transmission into my workshop. From ~Jan-Mar I worked on the engine. First time I'd seen a Porsche engine before, but since there is a great online community, technically, it was not too difficult. Because it was very rusted/dirty it took a lot of cleaning and sand/media blasting. I made a sandblasting hood which turned out to be very useful. After I completely disassembled the engine, I send the critical bits (i.e. heads, cams) to a shop in CA for machining and worked away at cleaning up the other parts. I won't bore you with the details, but in the end, it came out pretty nicely.

After finishing the engine, I did the same with the transmission. First disassembling it, cleaned all the parts, sourced replacements, then re-assembled it.

More in the next post...