I am finding myself around the house on a Bumbershoot weekend and I have prioritized taking advantage of the weekend weather to get my 914 up on the rotisserie and get into the garage so I can work out of the weather. This summer is Seattle has been the worst for weather in my memory and it started to get cold and rainy these last two weeks. So I am forced to move inside.

First up I needed to apply some basic primer to the exposed metal. This saved me around $350.00 bucks.

Today I managed to get the car mounted. I had to drill holes and template up to the bumper bolts on the 914 and get the attachment plates mounted. These are not done for you, it is something you have to figure out specific to your project. The goodness is I can use these for all future 914 projects. The car spins now pretty easy and I am ready to move into my garage later tonight. It is worth getting the hydraulics for the lifting, that made it super easy for me to adjust the car to the height and center of gravity.

Batteries are the most expensive, physically bulky and the heaviest part of any EV project. The huge costs don’t support the amateur conversion taking advantage of the higher end battery technologies like Lithium Ion, Lithium Phosphate, etc. So my options are based on flooded lead acid or sealed lead acid batteries. I leveraged the battery analysis work Tim did for his Civic Open Source Project and decided to go with Optima 31 Sealed Batteries. I mocked up the 12 batteries needed (144 volts) and next plan to start making the battery racks with a goal to preserve the true center of balance of the 914. I think others have messed this up in their designs by preserving too much of the stock areas in the 914. I will rip out and redo all I can to make it work the way I want it to be.

This weekend we ended up in Portland and the boy and I had our Sunday brunch at Voodoo. This was enough sugar to jack us up for 4 hours.

Then we headed over to the Llyod Center to shop for back to school and see the kids skate where Tonya Harding used to train. It is sad there is not even a statue to her there. Maybe I will take up that cause.

Heavy metal! I get a real thrill when I see a big truck back up the private road to our house and today they dropped off the rotisserie for car restoration. These things make it possible to spin a car 360 degrees and work and weld on it very easily. This one has hydraulics so I can lower it for my garage ceiling and move the 914 bodies around. I will need to primer it up to protect it and I will do this on the weekend. By next week I will have the first 914 up on it by next week.

We had the chance to get out this weekend and pack a bunch of stuff in. Took in Jack Johnson at the Gorge and headed to Portland for the weekend to see my buddy Shawn Mullins at the last show of the season at the Oregon Zoo and check out the crushed baby elephant that was born on Saturday.

Keeping with the project, I had the chance to meet with Tim and check out his 914 in detail while I was in Portland. I had the chance to drive it and try the AC version of the Electro-Automotive kit. It was great digging into the car and I had some changes in my plans. I looked at how Tim was approaching his Civic project and decided that I am going to go with the sealed 12 Volt 31 Optima Batteries. This will allow me to build and weld my own brackets and avoid the high dollar cost with the EA welded plastic boxes. I am mocking up my 12 batteries now and preparing placement diagrams. My goal is to maintain the same distribution towards the center of the car versus placing so much weight to the front of the wheels.

Not a ton of progress as of late as I am stuck with nut on the driver axle that is preventing me from removing the CV and Rotor. This sucks as I have broke a breaker bar, heated it up 20 times and now am facing taking it in to have an impact wrench remove it. A 37 year old rusted nut is a drag.

Some new toys arrived and I am excited to start welding!

We are starting to get into a lot more of the serious (and hard) work now. I dropped the engine and transmission and we finally got a solid look at all the work there, I will postpone even talking about it for now, it is daunting. I spent the weekend working on the critical areas of the body, removing the wiring harness and prepping all rust areas in the trunks. My short term goal was to get all surface rust and prep with POR-15 so we can move onto the other more serious areas that require welding of new sheet metal.

In the above shots you can see some pinholes from rust, but for now I am going to just put POR-15 on them and come back and do some cosmetic fiberglass as this area is so small and not critical.

The boy was in charge of removing floor pan tar…

Today I made a lot of progress. Removed the entire interior, all front glass, etc. Looks like I have some floorplan rust I need to attend to, not terrible, but still, dang. Next is the rocker panels and that will be the last area before I can really assess all the welding and replacement I will need to do.