Meatball964

The steering rack is the only part of this car I have yet to see or touch.
No drips on the floor, not to say there are no “weeps” so I shall soon see if rack seal madness is in order….

RicardoD

Another awesome madness thread. Thanks Goughary.

cobalt

Great thread so far. I am curious to your observations of the 993 rack. I personally agree and after driving the 964 Cup Car for a while and my track car with manual rack I prefer the power assist. Although the cup car is a hoot. I will miss having it in my garage. I always liked the 964 rack over the 993 rack but it has its advantages.

I did not know about the KW step down washers that is good to know. I am switching over to 993 uprights so the MCS's 12 & 14 mm bolts won't be an issue.

FYI on the big brakes. I just ordered new 993 TT front rotors to use with the 993 uprights. All in I think they were just under $500 from Porsche. You will need to use the uprights from the 993 or 993 adapters to use the front rotors as you know they are 5mm different than the 964 turbo which is the same sized rotor but the hat is slightly taller.

If you ever need real Yellow cad plating let me know. I can get it done for you at a reasonable price and it lasts far longer than Zinc. I also found using a solution of vinegar or any rust remover in a tumbler using polishing stones does a better job at removing the rust.

gregmitch

That hardware looks beautiful!

Tell me more about this 993 adapter to use the 993TT rotors on a 964 upright....I was under the impression the 993TT rotors couldn't be used with 964 uprights and 964 Turbo rotors were needed because of the hat. I know there's adapter needed for the big red caliper on the 964 uprights but didn't know about a rotor adapter. Am I understanding that correctly?

Goughary

I still have to get to the alignment...i don't know how cold it is down south there in New Jersey- you guys are waaaaaaay closer to the equator. We are 17 degrees here. And since i don't have the depth in the garage for a car and smart strings...the door has to be open when i align. So it can wait.

In the meantime....i parked my crusty (salt coated) 996 in there this morning when i got back from my morning meeting, and noticed my hand washing bucket was almost entirely frozen, so maybe I'll explain my back to basics approach to hand washing, so you all can be mildly disgusted....hygiene is gross when it's low-giene...

So as many of you know, or rather, a few of you, since there many of you that read this but never comment- but of those of you that do comment, many of you know, that i like to keep my footprint low. I prefer to not generate huge waste, and to some degree, i tend to be environmentally friendly.

To be fair to the actual environmentalists in the room, you guys are "good" to the environment. I try to be "less bad". I don't pretend. I just try not to make a lot of damage...

So here i am, in a garage, and as we all do, we start using the newest latest and greatest of things, and one of those things that happened to us all over the course of the years, was disposable towels and rubber gloves (nitrile, latex), also disposable. Yes, i think i just exposed my true age. Back in the 40s, we had no gloves, because leather was ill fitting and tended to leak, and we had raspy cotton towels....and...and, here is the important thing to remember, we got finger prints on the paint, and our paint had swirls, neither of which we noticed or cared anything about.

So time went on, and as i time traveled from there to my actual birth in 1970, the world didn't change much. Shop towels were shop towels. We had a parts cleaning tank, with petroleum products in it to wash greasy parts with. The drum underneath would get picked up every so often by a service and replaced with new...which effectively meant you washed your parts in dirty fluid, all the time. There may have been the "dirty" station and the "clean" station...but you catch the drift. Dawn dishwashing liquid was great in the eighties to have at the sink, so that you didn't have to use that scratchy soap...but if you were lucky, and had excess money laying around, there was always a supply of waterless hand cleaner, in the days before gojo and then that terrible scent came along, the citrus. Don't get me started on the citrus craze...when was that, the 90s???? Yuck.

Along the way, cotton shop towels were kind of a staple, but the paper products got better and better, culminating in the blue. The blue paper towel. Man o man. Rugged. Tells you when it's wet. Wowzers. Between those and the big rolls of Scott towels from Napa....bounty? The quicker picker upper? Are you kidding? Blue. Blue wins. Blue won. Blue was everything.

Until i found the towel. That isn't a towel. It's a fabric. Made in rolls, by a company, here in the states. Cut into towels like the blue ones, that size....feels like a paper towel, but more durable, more chemical resistance. Best disposable shop towel ever. I have some in the garage. Pass by if you ever want to be amazed. Those things are the bomb. But i keep some Scott rolls around for absorbency. I keep some blue around because they have their place. But these other "paper" towels were my go to. For everything.

Notice i didn't make mention of the stuff you find when you work in actual shop service- the brown rolls of basically paper. That stuff is just an embarrassment to the paper towel industry and has no business on this thread.

But the blue...



Here it is, shown in the 3 pack....

Do you have any idea, how quickly i can go through a 3 pack of blue towels? How fast do you get through a roll of towels?

Gloves...the other greatest invention...



These things. Where did they come from? The gods above shined down upon us and said, "thoust canstnowest taketh thine wife-eth or girl-friend-eth or evenst botheth, simultaneously, outst to dinner, after a day insteth the garagst."
The main god then waved a wand and appeared before us, gloves that work, that don't break, mostly, and that keep our hands pretty much clean....wow.

But they do break, we still get dirty. They aren't good for everything. Many chemicals will make them grow in size....wd40, brake cleaner, electronics cleaner, etc. basically all the things we use. If you have them on while using paint stripper, somehow the paint stripped gets inside the glove and strips the skin from your hands...

So how many of these do we go through in a day? A weekend? Boxes fly out of the garage into the trash. Piles upon piles of nitrile. Do we need to talk about what happens when seagulls get into this stuff in the landfill? Is that even true? I've hear a lot about plastic straws that is just simply not the case. What about my nitrile/latex gloves?

If i were a real environmentalist. I would know all the answers that i need to know. And...more importantly i would even likely know the first names of each bird and squirrel i was about to send to squirrel or bird heaven. ( or hell. Some of those little guys are terrible people, as you know ). But i am not, so i don't.

What i do know, is i generate waste. And for a while there it got out of control. Waaaaaay too much waste. Bags of dirty disgusting paper towels. Piles of gloves. Forget the money. How much this stuff costs? And in todays inflationary environment, with supply chain constraints on top, my goodness. Gloves should be 50 dollars per pack of 25...

So. What did i do? I had to do something. Remember all that technological advancement we had in glove tech? Paper towel tech? Well, on the petroleum parts cleaner side of things...we got Simple Green HD



I love this stuff. I love it so much, when my wife eventually leaves me...I'm flying to Vegas with my simple green hd, and making it official.
Me, and my siiiiiimple greeeen, strolling down the av-eh-newwwwww, as the song goes.

Towels? I went backward there. Amazon. Bought a pack of a few hundred red cotton shop towels.



I use, as much as i can, regular old cotton towels, that eventually end up in a pile to be washed, along with the shop blankets that i use on my floor to designate space, keep a soft place to drop tools, so they aren't dragging around on the cement floor all the time, and to buffer myself from that same hard cold harsh cement.

Does that get rid of the paper towel use? Nope. Not at all. But I'll now go months before going through a roll of blue towels. Which given how much work i do and how much wiping and cleaning and sopping up need i have, is pretty impressive.

Next, gloves. I just can't use that many. Boxes and boxes and piles and piles, if you know how many that is, it's a lot. And too much. So i use them sparingly now. I used them for my axle refresh back in this very thread. Why? Because moly grease is the planets most disgusting substance and once it gets on something, it never leaves. It's "everywhere" grease. It's those same gods playing a joke on us fools.
But we fooled them, we invented rubber gloves, and then, after they kept breaking with each scratch of our nose, we invented the thikster glove. And the world was in balance once again.
But i try not to use too many. Saves cost and saves the critters. (I think. I could be wrong about that. But i feel better now.)

I do this to keep my hands clean during the day, since i have no water service in my garage...

I first, eat some ice cream.



Then when the container is empty, i clean it. I have many of these containers. They are my favorite things...perhaps due to the way in which i obtain them.

I then add some simple green hd to the container.



I place a small cheepo brush next to that. Or on top. Makes no matter. It's close by.



In then have a 5 gallon water bucket



Can you see where this is going?

Once i have brushed on a little soap, rinsed my hands with the (getting dirtier through the day) water....i can dry them off with...



Cotton reusable shop towels.

That 5 gallon bucket, by the end of a good day of work, is kinda gross. And it's not very hygienic for sure. Like i said- it's lowgiene, but it makes me happy when the migrating birds come through town, and they stop to visit, blanketing my lawn. And i did get a thumbs up one day..



We don't really need a bunch of environmentalists in our lives preaching from pedestals...but, in my little world out here, i did need to look at the waste i was generating, due to one thing...because we developed the technology to make products that simply because they are up front low cost and they make life marginally easier, i would take full advantage and use way too much of it...which is what they are for. To buy too much of, use too much of, support the economy, and cry and whine when my ship can't offload me more at the port.

I have soap and water and a few cotton towels. It works. I'm good now.

Meatball964

Yup, cleanup can be a challenge lol

Ski Porsche

I’m one of your silent followers, who never comments because your projects are typically above my pay grade. Your writing style is worth reading your threads alone. If ever I’m in CT (possibly never, sadly—though I do have friends formerly of West Hartford now in Old Lyme. So…), I’m dropping in unannounced. I’ll stand quietly in a corner so as not to disturb your madness. Then I’ll slip out, just as quietly, after absorbing your unique brand of Porsche-ness.
That said, you left us all hanging with your description of “the towel” and then not naming it. I swear by the blue towel, but I need “the towel” in my garage as well (I do, in fact, some work on my P-car).
Thanks.

Goughary

I left you all hanging about "the towel". The guys around here have all experienced them. I have no idea if any of them feel as good as me about "the towel"...but the reason for the hang, was because I'm trying to get away from them. And from the blue towels. And I'm trying to use the red cotton shop towels as my primary.

Word to the wise. Don't take your grimy disgusting grease impregnated black sooty jeans and shop clothes off next to your pile of dirty cheapo red cotton shop towels, only to throw them all in the washing machine- to wash on "warm", particularly.

I throw my greasy stuff into the wash splashed with simple green hd, btw. Or for the bigger stuff, like the moving blankets. I poor dirty simple green hd after it's been used in the garage, all over the blankets and let that soak in. Toss those in the wash. They come out like new.

But- when you strip to the dirty bone downstairs and you toss your grimy clothes in the wash, trying to be nice to your wife and to not get black grease on anything in the white bathroom upstairs....and you happen to throw the red cotton towels in - because what a waste to do two loads when you really only need to do one....

Looking for that high five from the fish maybe?

Well...you end up with pink jeans and pink underwear. And you later feel a little....unmanly in the garage in your pink drawers...so be careful.

I am manly in pink. So i kept using all my pinks, until i destroyed them enough yo justify tossing them out...and I'm almost through all the various pink things. I might have another pinkish tshirt around.

Thank god i make all my own tshirts in the dbfd motorsport teespring.com store...cuz i can just make more madness shirts...i need to go do some updating there.

Oh- and when you are ever heading up or down i95 in Connecticut, you are welcome to pop in!

Goughary

My favorite dbfd tshirt of late is this one...





I wish i knew how to say that in German...but alas i only speak Italian...and some English as you may surmise...

Next tshirt might say:

A l'è dura a vìghel mol, ma l'è pussè dura a vìghel dur e savìa minga 'ndùa mètel.

Who knows.

Who even knows what that means?

Goughary

Here we are...20 degrees yesterday and mid fifties today. Have to get the alignment done...had to work in half hour bursts today in between work stuff. But today was the day. Big storm coming in tonight...



Camber gauge.



Peel away the old seal and peel. Will explain in a moment)

Loosen up the camber plates. So here is a question. Did elephant use 1/2 American hardware or m8 metric hardware for these plates? Kills me when American companies do this. I haven't checked the threads. But the 1/2 inch wrench fits way better on the nut than the 13mm...so it's either terrible quality metric or it's sae, which kills me.



Anyway, i work with what i have. Loosen these guys up.



I set the alignment. Which in this case was really just front camber and toe settings...

And it's time to drop it off the hub stands and onto its wheels...



By the way- this is what my custom lugs look like on the car with the wheels on.



And unfortunately, my tires are aging out, but they were once very cool, and "liscio"...old hotrod trick...



Make sure to set the tire pressures...so you know your pressures are correct side to side. We don't want the car pulling for the wrong reason.
This is my favorite gauge. Love this thing. Glows in the dark. It's super accurate. And each line is one pound. So very easy to read.





Out she goes for a test drive! Haven't been in this car on the road in ages...



I got out there, and it was tramlining really badly. And knowing i had set front camber to -1 degree, that tramlining was my last thought. I thought maybe it was the rack? Maybe something was loose? Maybe i did something else wrong? Felt all over the place...but, I could already tell the steering was MUCH quicker. And with what the alignment was doing, it was really darty, so home i went...plus the steering wheel was almost straight, but just off.



Threw the strings back on to tweak...and I see now i have -3.5 degrees negative camber on the front....how?

Seriously - how?

No matter - we all make mistakes. Got that worked out. Tweaked the tie rods, got the wheel spot on. And out i went again.

Car is pulling to the left. Hard.

Back into the garage. Camber was a little off on the right front, tweak that...I'm now -1.1 degree. We are good.

Quick drive. Car feels great. Back in to button up.



Gotta be sure to mark the plates. So if anything moves...we know.

And then...it's not a race car. And it's got racecar stuff on it...so we gotta "mod" the racecar stuff...because who wants rain and dirt in the frunk? These camber plates are not sealed. So i seal them with Dap seal and peel. I don't worry about being clean. I don't look at them, ever. So slop that stuff in there...









As you saw back in the beginning of this post, it comes out very easily. And leaves zero residue. So works perfectly for what it needs to do.

And out for the final drive. Took a long one at the end of the day. Wow. Feels fantastic. Steering is tight and quick. Noticeably quicker than the stock 964 rack. Steering is lighter which ill have to get used to. Car feels much more sporty, as you make small movements of the wheel and she moves quick...love it. I'll now have to grab another C4 and go truely back to back.

964Luftballoon

oooh now I get the Seal and Peel. When we spoke over the phone i didn't quite get it. I also forgot you have camber plates and not the standard oem mounts. Pretty cool!

cobalt

Very informative and entertaining but my first thought when you were doing the alignment was the variation in temps and how that might impact the alignment. Not sure but I bet your answer lies in there someplace.

I use seal and peel for the house never thought of it for the car.

Goughary

Funny thing about temps...i put the wheels on, and set the cold temps all around to 34. Went out for a quick test drive, came back did my tweaks, check my pressures and i was 38 the way around...must have been a lot colder in the garage than i had thought. I wasn't driving hard enough to really get any heat in the tires. They just warmed to working temp. Or "room temp", as it were.

Needless to say, dropping 4 lbs of air for the "cold pressures" made a huge difference as well.

As far as the big screw up on the alignment, i probably should have set the car on the ground with an "eyeballed" alignment and driven around the block before doing the initial setup. Clearly things needed to settle.

The thing i really appreciate about having the string sets, is that this can be done at home so easily and when tweaks and changes need to be made, that you can really dial things in. How many times do you get your car back from a shop and your wheel is juuuuuuuuust slightly off. Granted you can just go under yourself and tweak the tie rods to fix that...but it's nice to be able to know what your toe settings are after doing so.

Fwiw...my front toe setting is approximately one fifth of my left thumbnail. Next time I'll have someone take a picture of that if I'm not doing the alignment solo in the garage.

That is to say- alignment on a laser-measured hunter rack is for the shop. Not the client. The laser racks make set up quick, and getting to a specific measurement quick. So the book says x toe and x camber...and boom, you dial that in and button it up. Print the sheet, and out they go after having paid a large bill.

Strings are equally as good, in the hands of someone that has a clue. But they take a huge amount of time, in relative terms to set up. And then in my case, I like to get things to feel a certain way, which requires, usually, tweaks, so I will typically set aside a day if it's only the front end, and a weekend if it's front and rear...although you can typically get it all sorted on the first day.

Shops can't do that. They need you to pay and get out, so they can get the next one done.

Now...if i were to invest in a better set of hub stands that were more well adapted to alignment, and some real slip plates...well, things would be even that much better. But that would only mean that i get to the same place quicker, not better.

Point I'm making, is don't worry about cost. A string set is anything that can hold two strings in straight lines off the sides of the car, in such a way where you are a given distance off center. So think- "3 feet to the left of your license plate front and rear"....and you have some thing to measure against.

The setup can be cheap and easy. The brain surgery comes in the experience once you start doing and learning. But since the shop manual gives you a baseline set of measurements, you don't need to be a brain surgeon!

Today we have huge wind. I'd like to get out later and drive. It's hard going from the 996 to the 964. Much easier when it's only a 964. So if anyone wants to trade a 964 c4 for a 996 c4, let me know! Then I won't have these where i have to "get used to it" again. Clutch, steering, shifting, brakes...so different.

Goughary

Before we begin, there were a few things i saw on the interwebs this week that kinda huffed my chuttles...

First: we had this. And since I've always had dreams of making a set of 16 inch fans for my car, it caught my attention...



Good idea? Perhaps.

Second, and likely because it rubs so close to home...having been attached to a ceiling some time in the past...as we know, i didn't die. But wow. Not fun.



This one, largely due to my enjoyment of Vincent. If you haven't read his letters to Theo, that wouldn't be a terrible idea.



And as we know...there is a vessel full of paint to sample gt3 that were bound for climate controlled garages, good weather and healthy ppf wraps, which now will never know what life would would have felt like under all that pampering. Oh to live forever without even one swirl....

But...we find out that yet another electric vehicle issue strikes again...or did it? We will never know.



Today was a beautiful day. I fully intended to do an oil change on my wife's 4.2 liter V8 Allroad, which oddly enough, takes about as much oil as our 964s...

I hang the front out of the garage, which gets the front high enough for me to crawl under to get the belly pan off, so i really only do it on clear warm days. But instead, i decided today was the day to take advantage of Apple and their recall of the AirPods. (Google that one of you have AirPods or Airpod pro). So off we went to the mall and the apple store. I handed off my pods to them for testing. And we played some games...



My AirPods failed miserably, which i knew would be the case. They gave me a new set, and off i went. Somewhere in there, i got the distress call. The text. The notification. The "I need help".

It didn't sound pathetic. Nor did it sound like someone was drowning and if i weren't to show up, it would be the early end of a way too nascent life. But there was tone. Maybe i was reading into it. But i felt it. The tone. There was a need, if only to commiserate over one of the worlds worst and sometimes most difficult jobs, which is truely one of the easiest, but only when the car has had these parts removed sometime in the previous 35 years. Otherwise, what a pain.

So i agreed. Dropped the kiddo at home, and back out i went. Nice day for a drive. Blue sky. Warm. Sunny. Saturday.



I arrived to find the meatball up in the air.
That little video game player up above named this guy "meatball"....wonder why?

And todays install? This:



A 993 rack brace and poly bushings. Should be easy...right?

But we are in the presence of the meatball, and so we are now in the presence of so much coolness. So much stuff. I didnt take pics of the toolboxes...but i did shoot a couple of the toys..









And apparently he has me on speed dial on this line...



And as an aside, we did take a good look at the pistons and cylinders he has for sale



Before getting to the rack. And the stuck bolt.



Ugh. There is always one stuck bolt. 35 years of working it's way into "stuckness".

So we broke out a bunch of tools...



You'll notice the kitchen torch in there - i needed some heat but we needed it to be very focused...so kitchen butane torch it was. Still didn't break loose right away...so we pulled out the little cheater pipe...



I almost thought to buy this man a new set of proper "bust this loose" tools upon leaving...cuz little tools work when life is good. But life with a 35 year old car is rarely good. So you need to have some "I'm gonna break you" tools for special occasions.

After a bit of breaking and struggling...wiggling and wrenching....we squeezed it all together. And got the little bugger to seat.

All buttoned up!



I then left, as i had to get home to do some of my own madnessing...but since I've been doing so much on the rack madness, it was good to pop out and help another local 964 meatball to get something related done...and on the way home, i called Greg, (Amazon), who gave the 993 rack brace to the meatball to begin with...to tell him of my trials and tribulations (bitching), and what was Greg doing? Typical Connecticut Saturday living in the woods...he got on the phone, we started down the rack madness road, he hangs up abruptly to get something done, and sends me the picture he had to snap before it was too late...



This guy apparently came for a visit just as we started talking. So cool. So scary. Hide your little dogs and little video players!

Then - we get this CRAZY warning over the phone lines. WINTER SQUALL ALERT. Beep beep beeeeeeeeeep beep beep WINTER SQUALL ALERT!!!!

But the sky was blue. It was a beautiful day.

Half way home - I'm looking to my left. Sky is black. To my right. Sky is beautiful and blue. Uh oh.

Just after i pulled in my driveway...3pm.



And now it's 5pm, sky is blue. It's beautiful outside. Pink clouds in the distance. And that hawk is likely hanging around somewhere, hungry. Very upset that his afternoon of hunting was disturbed by the squall.

But the Meatball has a rack brace and tight bushings. Life is in balance.

Meatball964

Rob = 1 Meatball = 0
Aching fingers an all! Outcome would have been much worse if left to my own demise.
Just a cheater pipe & pinch bar isn’t enough with these cars…
Looks like a test drive will have to wait due to “squall-mageddon”
Much appreciated!