Recovering parts is something you have to invest time in when restoring and working on cars. Some parts are just not obtainable (this is why you buy a donor car) and others are so phreaking expensive, you cringe. The motor mounts and the outside trailing arms pieces on the 914 are these kinds of parts. You have to recover and fix them or call AA and my last quote was US 650.00 to get used versions. So I took off the motor mount and prepped it up. It needs some Dremel work to get all the rust out and final prep (work for the boy!) and it saved me a bunch of money. It was very detailed work and required a lot of fine grinding and spot weld removal.

Then I made a purchase last week of a 74 914 that literally was out of a barn. It was part of an estate of a man who passed and his wife traded the car to a company for tree work and I picked it up from them. It is one of the most desirable 914’s with a 2.0 FI (all intact) and the brown interior. A little surface rust in some places, but none of the big problems prone to 914’s as it has been in a shed for 14 years. The guy who I bought it from took it to the Porsche shop and got it all running and drivable, but they scared him by saying the car should be converted to Weber Carbs for a grand or so. So he panicked a bit and decided to sell. Of course the Fuel Injection on a 2.0 was awesome and very economical, you can get 35-40 MPG out of these cars when you get them tuned and working right. Most Porsche mechanics don’t like to work on a 40 year old FI design and so conversion to dual Weber Carbs is pretty typical on these cars and it destroys their originality and value IMO. I contacted him directly after seeing it listed on EBay and paid for it there on the spot and covered his EBay fees. I won’t say what I got this for, but it was roughly 1/2 it’s value after some TLC. Mileage is @ 38K on the speedometer and we really can’t tell if it did a full turn as the car has all original stuff on it, so once when I get into more engine work via the inspection plate and reviving the FI, I will report back on what I really think the mileage is.

Because I am going to leave this car all original (to preserve the value) I am recovering parts from the other 74 like the Rivera mags and Monza muffler, etc. I will post pictures as I update things.

This weekend we turned the corner and start actually adding to the car restoration versus just pulling rusty stuff off. This is a critical time as you have to get fittings in place for the longitude members and get all the measurements back within tolerances. I did a lot of detailed metal shaping and fitting so I could get the Clecos all in an tightened up to prepare for the welding. I measured everything and checked all tolerances from my original notes. I am going to take a couple more days to measure and check alignments and then begin the welding of the pieces into final placement. Wohoo!

Sometimes things go your way completely unintended. When I first bought the two 914’s, I thought that the sunflower 74 was the better car. Sure it had been sitting for a while and had rusty wheel bearings, pretty typical for being in the elements for 10 years. But something stopped me and I chose the Blue 72 car to do the first conversion on. The blue car had more rust and a longitude replacement was required (which really complicated the project) but my thinking was do the hard one first and the 74 will be easy. What I have come to discover is that the 72 is a really solid car and the 74 is a piece of SH%$%! The PO was a bit of a scammer and I was not versed enough in the details to pick up on some of the issues. But I will come back to that.

In the meantime I have managed to remove all rusty pieces from the passenger side of the car and place in the new metal for the longitude front and back. We did make a mistake and cut the rear longitude too short and I have been awaiting a replacement from AA for 2 weeks (c’mon!).

So with all that in flight and the 74 being crappy, I quickly sacrificed the bugger for a parts car and have been removing the fenders and parts for placement on the 72. Which actually works great as I get to coordinate the part removal and make sure the easiest path to welding in the replacements.

Removing a fender from a 914 is intensive. It took about 6 hours with a spot welding removal bit and lots of targeted chiseling. But the part is perfect, in great shape and will make the repair on the 72 a lot easier to align on the door. I also noted a rear collision repair on the back as the fender was tacked and welded back incorrectly. Hard to determine the severity of the damage originally, but it looks like a fix to the rear versus the fenders. The real “scam” is that the PO said the battery was moved to the trunk long ago (true) and the was rust free (false) and looking closer, you can see a pretty poor repair in that area. We will compare it to my work in a few weeks.