evoderby

When looking at the picture of your rear bulkhead I already thought to notice it looks markedly different to the way I remember the Freisinger "speedster" is built, the triangular strenghtening pieces are the first things that caught my eye in addition to the much increased space.

Your further comments confirm this to indeed be the fact.....big thanks for sharing your insights into the wonderful world of proper speedster creation JP!


p.s. All starting to make even more sense now Colin ;-)

grahampeterm

Easier second time around hey Colin! ?



G

NineMeister

Yes, definitely. Hopefully by the 4th or 5th we might even be fast enough to make some money on the job!

JPP

Hi Jason! Yes, I've been following this through the PCA web updates. Have you seen the entire series of restorations they've posted pictures of? '62 Cab, '73RS, etc.? Porsche had almost 'lost' the art of restoration until they re-established the 'vintage' department when the new Museum facility opened a couple of years ago. In addition to customers cars, I was told they have 'garages full' of rare, one-off, special, racing, prototype cars all waiting their turn ... I want a tour!
http://www.porsche.com/international...ryrestoration/

Thanks, and you're right, I was as confused as you because I thought .. 'well, they were Porsche's choice to convert cars for their customers back in '97 .. this must be right ..' then I saw Graham's build and it all became quite clear that Freisenger was 'cutting a few corners' .... literally! (Ha. I just cracked myself up .. ) It kind of begs the question ... 'what else has been sacrificed to maximize profits?' .....

Hey Graham! I think those were the last 'separated' Porsche factory Speedster 'Inserts - 964 502 651/652 00 GRV' available for £48.08 at the time of your build ... and just checking my invoice ... I had to pay £569.89 each side for the entire rear 'Wheel Housing' to get a pair of those .. oooo, I'm sorry I looked that up now ..

Practice makes perfect .. Arpad's Speedster is next! So .... you're not just doing this purely because of our passion for 993 Speedsters???

JPP

To be clear, much of the work that was being done on my car at 9m was being done simultaneously ... rear bulkhead, sills, front dash/cowl/A pillar .. because Marc and Owen were working together as a team and all of it is connected and has relationships that create logical and sometimes critical steps that have to be taken out of a 'linear' sequence ... So, you will see progress and changes happening on the A pillars and dash in some of these pictures that was occuring at the same time that the rear bulkhead and sills were being stripped and re-fabricated ... and I'll get to those areas in due course.

So, again, the original Turbo body work was missing some very critical inner support structure that spans the gap created between the narrow body Longitudinal frame members at the 'B' pillar and the widened Turbo rear fenders. Porsche calls these 'Turbo Gussets' .. 9m calls them 'Kidney Bowls' .. I called them Missing In Action ...

Here's the factory 'Turbo Gussets' that should have been installed on my Cabriolet at BHP.. they are identical to narrow body parts except for the spot welded 'extensions' on them that get welded to the Turbo's inner rear quarters .. without those .. you have Gaposis and no load path ..


That welded connection on both the narrow body and Turbo body cars drives most of the rear body flex and twisting loads down through the strong bottom corner of the 'B' pillar and forward through the frame's Longitudinal members to the 'A' pillar/front Cowl and bulkhead so the entire chassis dissipates the motion and the chassis retains it's rigidity and structural integrity. Because my car was completely missing the added 'gussets' and most of the welds connecting the outer and inner sill covers through to the inner Longitudinal frame had been drilled out and not replaced ... my car had NO load path for the widened rear end to cancel out the effects of any twisting and flexing let alone the added strain of the wider bodywork .. AND any flexing and/or twisting at the mid-chassis had no load path either ... What could they have been thinking?? When I think about the implications and the possible failure scenarios ... it gets me a little riled up ..

So, more surgery to remove the old outer Turbo sill covers .. there are these and then an inner cover to remove before the actual Longitudinal member is exposed ...



Here's the exposed inner sill longitudinal cover and standard narrow body 'kidney bowl' in place .. no trace of any 'Turbo Gusset' there ..


Here's the inner cover after Marc carefully 'picked' the factory welds to expose the longitudinal ...


... and finally, the exposed longitudinal .. Marc then prep's this area for the installation of 9m's own engineered longitudinal frame stiffeners. I can't show you pictures of that, because they are proprietary to 9m and they have asked me to keep it that way. I know it's expensive to develop items like this and people aren't always 'honorable' so sometimes, if you want to see behind the curtain, you have to pay admission .. But, I can tell you they work REALLY well ... and I think Graham would say the same ..

JPP

Next, the 9m stiffeners and Turbo Kidney Bowl 'Gussets' are installed and the sills start coming back together. Again, 9m's focus here is to leave as much of the factory fabrication in tact as possible and when it comes to the 'A' pillars and 'B' pillars on a 911, that can be critical. It's important, at least for me, to understand that these are the main vertical Datums that Porsche uses to index the rest of the chassis build off of. The main horizontal Datum here is the Cellette bench that the chassis is bolted down to ... as I understand it, the most critical vertical Datum is the 'A' pillar, and everything, including the secondary 'B' pillar is indexed from that, then the 'B' pillar becomes a Datum index for much of the rear fabrication location points. Can you tell I used to teach CAD engineering in the last 5 years before I retired from Aerospace?? .... anyways ...

First up, Marc picks the welds on the factory 'Turbo Kidney Bowls' to get just the gusset extension pieces isolated so he can weld those on to the existing Kidney Bowls .. thus eliminating the need to disturb the factory 'B' pillar and maintain those critical factory Datums ..
Here's the new metal .. you can see the factory spot welds holding the Turbo gusset's on ..


And, here's the 'picked' parts resting on top of the cars standard narrow body Kidney bowls .. getting ready for install ..


In the meantime, the stiffeners have been installed and now the Turbo gussets are welded on and then the inner longitudinal covers can be clamped into place to be welded back in. 9m welds through these into the new stiffeners as well to create a unified welded Longitudinal assembly that is a bit stiffer than the factory RS ... Also, at every level, the boys are sealing all new welds with sealer and applying coatings of etching sealer and primers that exceed factory spec ..


so .. the car has now gone from a "Flammange" as Marc described her after his initial drive .. to a greatly improved platform .. to say the least



Here's the finished left side with hand applied e-coat and primer. They've mounted the doors to re-check alignments here ...

NineMeister

'So funny. I'm reading down this thread and thinking to myself "oh yeah, I remember that bit..."


As for this photo, what the majority of you won't realise is that Marc only unpicked the welds at each end and along the bottom of the sill. The top lip was not attached.

JPP

... uh, ... oh damn.... I guess, no matter what, it can always get worse!
How the f***K did I drive this car down to SLO for that photoshoot for Excellence without killing myself, the car and several bystanders??

Magdaddy

duh, Jesus was your co-pilot.

Ya still need the bullet proof pope bubble put on that ride of yours. The world is a nasty, mean place ya know.

bbs993tt

JPP, thanks for the detailed and thorough documentation of the conversion process. When you have a chance, we'd still love to see some hi-res pics of the finished product.

daveHy

I was insanely jealous of you picking up one of the widebodied cabs at the time but what a downer for you learning the work was not done correctly. Looks like all's well that ends well here after reading this fantastic thread the boys at 9m have done a great job in giving you something (allmost ) unique. Many congratulations from down under.

NineMeister

Come again. (almost) unique?

There's only ever going to be one 9m93 SpeedArena so we definitely don't need the almost!

firesm

Really? These things are a dime a dozen - I'm pretty sure I saw one in a Walmart parking lot last week. Autotrader has added 9m Speedster to it's drop down menu for it's search function...

NineMeister

Oh, how I wish that were true.......

JPP

Oh .. yes, good point .. I have to say just the car itself is quite a detterent .. people are soo busy either staring or trying their damnedest NOT to stare ... that they're all over the road. Yesterday, a guy on a bicycle literally ran himself off the pavement and almost crashed staring at the car going by .. my co-pilot said 'he was saying 'wow' .. right before he lost it' .. ... I got a feeling this is a blessing and a curse as they say .....
LOVE the new avatar, BTW ..

Hi Brian, I was hoping you were reading along because I think I'm probably answering a few of your questions .. but I'll be emailing you soon as well, I've been playing 'catch-up' since getting back last week. Maybe you can enlighten me on how to post Hi-Res stuff here or how to at least make some available through Photobucket .. or some other 'share' photo site ..?? I know .. it's one of my technical weak points ..

Hi Dave, and thanks. To be honest, I knew there were problems and 'adjusted' what I paid for the car as a result, but it was VERY disturbing to see the extent of obvious negligence combined with the lack of oversight that allowed it all to be passed to a customer as a 'new' Porsche sanctioned vehicle .. for $120K!!

.... no, no, that was me .. I was just running into the CVS next door to get a prescription ... She ain't going to be no garage queen, ya know. I've got a couple of HUGE dragon fly's stuck on that pretty Turbo front bumper right now that I need to scrape off after yesterdays fun run ..

.. uh, oh. Will you still take my calls when your rich and famous??