Please help us to welcome the newest addition to our fold....acquired this past Monday. She's an 85 Euro AT, black on black, with BBS wheels. Isn't she a beauty?






We found it in some guy's garage outside of Pittsburgh. She had been sitting for ten years, and was billed as needing only a torque tube, but that it was a strong runner....though sadly that did not all turn out to be the case. She not only wouldn't start the morning we went to pick her up, but the torque tube turned out to be the least of her drive train problems. Still, we trailered her home anyway, because she was so damn pretty, and the price was right.

On the bright side, since she's an 85, and the no start issue turned out to be a result of the PO trying to jump her to get her started (yikes!), the problem was the fuel and ignition brains. As luck would have it, we never unloaded the 85/86 brains we were trying to sell a few weeks back (purchased for Pandora when she was having all those problems last year), and they were the perfect fix...after Kevin tinkered with the other usual suspects for half an hour, he threw in the brains and presto! the car started right up with half a tank of ten year old gas, and sounded awesome. If you don't count the fact that the water pump is seized solid and the timing belt is so covered in oil that it slips right past and doesn't break anything, and the fact that she doesn't move yet, she's almost perfect.

The torque tube did have problems, as indicated by the PO. Not a problem...we have a torque tube sitting on the side of the garage from our old 84 US that was long ago stripped and stored. But what the PO didn't tell us was that the trans is toast. Burnt black fluid, lots of metal in the pan, and you can roll her around in park. Not good. Thankfully, our good buddy Roger at 928sRus has the fix for that. He's got an 84 US trans that should do the trick nicely. Thanks Roger!!

Turns out, this car was a 928 International car at one time. The PO tells us that the guy he bought it from purchased it from 928 International many moons ago. So we feel somewhat privileged to have such an honored guest in our garage today.

This is going to be Kevin's new project. After he gets her sorted out in good condition, he's going to try the supercharger again, see if he can't do better than he got with Pandora, which wasn't really really Euro after all. Pandora is now officially my car , as Twister has finally blown her head gaskets (not unexpectedly), and had so many other problems that she wasn't worth saving. She's being stripped in the garage as we speak, and is going to that great junkyard in the sky as soon as he can get her cleaned out.

It's going to be quite a project for Kevin, as he will be taking some parts out of Pandora (suspension and steering stuff, mostly), some parts out of Twister, and some parts out of the basement to get the new car going again. He will need to swap parts among the three cars for quite a while, such as with the suspension. He will take shocks and springs, and a few other goodies, out of Pandora to put in the new car, because it's all brand new. But the parts to put back in Pandora are currently on Twister, so that needs to be pulled apart at the same time. There's a lot of this sort of thing planned -- so it may be perhaps the largest concurrent 928 project in the world!

Can't wait until he gets the new car all settled so we can hopefully take both our cars out on some of the runs this year!

 

NICE! BTW, I 'm jealous of Kevin.I wish my wife was as involved as his!

 

Congrats!! I'll look forward to your updates as the work progresses!!

 

Very cool. I really appreciate your "I'll you gotta do is..." attitude.

 

Nice! However, you were in the Burgh and you didn't call
How did you get wind of it?

 

Thanks, guys! Linderpat, sorry we didn't call. It was really a crazy long day, Cannonball Run style. We hit the road at 3:30 am on Monday morning, drove straight to his house and arrived at 9:45 a.m. Spent four hours doing business with him, running around getting rental stuff and visiting a notary's office to transfer title. By 2:00 we were back on the road, and again drove straight through...arriving home around 9:00 that night. Exhausting! But fun, too. I got to drive a truck with trailer for the first time in my life, and I didn't even wreck it or anything!

He found the car on Craigslist!

 

Nice pics Leslie! Looks like a keeper.

I know your old car had some frame damage so I'm glad the new one is straight. I'm sure the mechanicals are minor work for Kevin, the part swapping will be the part that takes the most time.

I didn't realize the '85 Euros were 16 cars. I thought in '85 they were all 32vers.

Good luck with it and let me know if Kevin needs help with anything (although it's much more likely that I'd need his help). Great find!

 

Thanks Mike. The 85 and 86 Euros were 16v. The 85-86 US cars were 32v. As I understand it from Jim B. at 928 International, the 85 and 86 Euros get progressively more rare to find, as there was less incentive to bring them into the country when the US version was already available as 32v.

Wanna come up here and help Kevin push the cars around in the driveway? He really needs to figure out a way to get the black car away from the garage so the junker can come out...but short of doing the trans job in the mud, we have no solutions to the problem.

 

I have the same problem at my house. 1 car garage, 4 cars. You do the math. Even changing oil is a major hassle. Especially since Colleen's Mustang convertible sleeps in there all winter and when the weather is bad!

I'll give him a hand if you're serious, I'm planning to go to the GTG on the 22nd so I'll be up there, I can stop by on the way in or out if it can wait that long.

I LOVE black cars BTW, especially black 928s. They're a major PITA to keep clean but man, when they're done up nice: .

Seriously, have Kevin drop me a line if he needs a hand.

 

Thanks Mike, I'll let him know you offered!

Here's a bunch of pics Kevin took today while he replaced the seized water pump. I've no idea what the significance is in these pics, so don't ask! You guys know more about what you see in there than I do.

 

Nice grab you two. Glad to see Kevin getting his hands dirty. No scoring that I can see on the pump area. Very good to see.

 

Nice find!!!

It looks like four 928's is a nice round number. I wonder if Lorelei would notice two more showing up....

 

LOL....actually, the white one is long gone, and the dark blue one is heading down that same road to destruction. It takes two 928's to make one good one, don't you know?

 

I know this joy and pain too well. I just finished my Euro find...was a 4 month chase issues, engine out, refresh, search for parts ,time consuming, head beating, messy, greasy fire drill. Was it worth it? I'll let you know when it's legal.

Congrats on the find! I hope you paid peanuts like me as the parts cost nearly what I paid for the car. Best of luck with the beast....easy/cheap 310hp if you can lasso it in.

BTW, I had to lie to U-Haul and tell them I was hauling a 911 otherwise they wouldn't rent me the trailer...said the car is too heavy. How did you guys get them to rent you one?

 

The guy never said a word about that to me. His only caution to me was that the spoiler might have been an issue when getting it on and off the trailer, which it wasn't. Wouldn't have mattered anyway, because the spoiler was already damaged. I suggested that we could back it on, and he said no, that 60% of the weight had to be in front, so it had to go on engine first. I laughed and told him these cars have 50/50 weight distribution, so all four wheels weigh just about the same. He was very surprised to hear that, but let me rent the trailer anyway.