7 February 2012
The weather this past weekend was pretty nice for winter—dry, sunny and calm. Yes, it was Super Bowl Sunday, but I hadn't watched any pro football all season so far, why start now? So instead of watching the game (and commercials) we took the Porsche to the coast for lunch and a walk on the beach.
This was actually the first time I've been able to get the car out on the road. Other than the 60 miles on the freeway coming home when we picked it up, it's been all in-town driving until this. And I was very pleased. The car is comfortable, competent and fun to drive on these roads.
Oh, all is not perfect, I did learn a couple of things. For one, I will need to take another look to the adjustment of the shift linkage. Another point for the future will be replacing the motor mounts, as I think the ones now in the car are too soft (probably from age) and under certain circumstances the engine can get to rocking on the mounts which can cause the car to lurch and jerk at low speeds.
I don't have firm plans for the motor mounts yet, but re-adjusting the shift linkage should happen before too long as I will do that in combination with a couple of upgrades. To work on the linkage, the console and shift boot need to come out. The vinyl cover on the original console has one good rip, and numerous smaller gouges in it, so I found and bought a new-to-me replacement that is very nice. It is sitting in the garage now, awaiting the delivery of a new shift boot/knob combo that should arrive soon. Once the boot/knob arrives in a few days, I'll do the whole works.
20 February 2012
The shift boot/knob arrived last week, and so I began the install and shift linkage re-adjustment Saturday. Boy, did this job have a surprise for me.
I began by removing my original, damaged console and removed the shift tower to have the gate shifter's tab welded on as recommended by the kit's manufacturer. After that was done I proceeded to re-adjust the shift coupler. Somewhere in this process, it went sour. I'm not certain what I did, but I got the adjustment far enough out of whack that when I tested it by running through the gears, suddenly everything felt wrong. No matter how I adjusted it, there appeared to be gears missing. I appeared to have lost a good part of the side-to-side motion.
On further checking, it became obvious that most of the time, I had two gears engaged at once, and one of them was always reverse. This seemed familiar to me, so I searched the Pelican Parts 911 Tech forum for "915 reverse stuck" and got numerous hits, mostly all relevant. ('915' is the model number of the transmission.)
Several of these threads had posts from John Walker which recommended removing the reverse light switch and pushing the rod found there back into the transmission. Doing this should disengage reverse gear. John noted that sometimes the rod will go in fairly easily, but other times it might require a bit of effort.
I decided that to try to ease the process, I put the shifter into what would appear to be neutral, at which point only reverse itself was engaged. I had the left side of the car up as high as I could get it with my floor jack, and supported by jack-stands front and rear. This left the left rear wheel well up in the air. I released the parking brake, then pulled the reverse light switch and pushed on the small rod found inside. Wouldn't budge, but that didn't surprise me. So I pushed on the rod while jiggling the left rear tire back and forth, and that worked—the rod popped back into place and the rear wheel spun free! I was back in neutral!
After putting everything back and getting the car back on the ground, I proceeded to (far more carefully) adjust the coupler correctly, and then installed the new shift boot/knob and console.
At this point, all seems well again. Everything works, and the re-adjustment (once done correctly) seems to have helped, as the reverse lock-out mechanism seems to work more reliably now. I don't know if there will be any lingering effects from this. So far, so good.
Continued in April...
