A few things to know before stealing my 914
hagerty.com
hagerty.com
I still like to casually drop "oh yeah, I used to have a Porsche back when I was 16." Although I must say it was in immeasurably better shape than this one :D
I still dream of finding an old 914 and giving it an electric conversion… I'd have to do something about that rear window, though, it whips air forward when you drive with the top down.
Eh? I literally got a brand new electric VW e-Up last week, it's exactly that. It even still has analog dials, and VW provides a mount for your phone instead of an "infotainment" system. The height of sophistication is DAB radio and heated front window and seats.
I highly recommend it, it's a hoot - and with 150 miles range and rapid charging capability it's more than enough for all my needs.
That's the dashboard in it, it's as "bare minimum" as it gets: https://media.drivingelectric.com/image/private/s--7PGbPUr6-...
I assume that at this point there are enough wrecks of Model S/X/3/Y that you should be able to pick up electric motors from them at junkyards.
The thing I really worry about with electric swaps is battery. You could have a Note 7 situation on your hands _real easy_ if you're not careful.
Companies like EV West in California and Swindon in the UK offer bolt-in kits for 1960s cars, in particular the VW Beetle and the original Cooper Mini
Long term, as engine parts become harder to source, especially for low volume european cars, Electric Conversion is rapidly becoming the accepted way to keep these classics on the road for another 100 years.
Being an automotive engineer that worked for Tesla seems to be helpful, though.
Unfortunately, though you might find one with a smaller screen, you won't find ANY new car with no screen these days -- backup cameras (and, by implication, a screen to see its feed) have been required on new cars in the US since 2018.
Rebuilt one at 16 and took it to college!
It was a really fun car to drive although it also shared many of the same quirks as mentioned in this story.
There was a six cylinder version of this as well (super rare) and they made a prototype 914/8 which was never offered for sale, afaik only two were made (one for Ferdinand Porsche, one for Ferdinand Piëch).
I love when people have such a deep knowledge of something that they can write an essay as unique and thoughtful as this. It reminds me of Kitchen Confidential, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman!, or any rant about British politics by David Mitchell.
The fact this essay works for someone with limited domain knowledge and someone with lots is a testament to the quality of writing.
Double declutching is a lost art, it seems.
It involved moving the shifter into neutral, revving the engine still in neutral, and clutching and shifting into the gear when the RPMs were "right". Skilled double-declutchers could shift nearly as quickly as ordinary drivers with syncromesh.
Common in older cars when I was young, in the proterozoic.
I get that door handles and lock cylinders are often made of easily-broken pot metal, but most owner communities have figured out solutions, or just live a little and recognize that a locksmith can easily get you into almost any vintage car if necessary.
The starting problems mean your engine is poorly tuned/maintained, battery issues are bad wiring or undiagnosed parasitic drain (or just buy a battery maintainer, dude), and thinking "my first gear syncro is worn or my shift linkage isn't properly adjusted, I should mash the shit out of it" are purely owner error / strongly counter-indicate "I know a ton about cars."
I was about to write more or less the same thing. I can barely drive and never owned a car, but this article was beautiful.
I can't find the original, but the copy there is exactly what I remembered.
The BMW car forum is good, bimmerforums.com. Pelicanpart forum is good. BMW/Porsche GrassrootMotorsports is good. General racing, falls back to bmw/porsche/corvette/mazda Miata.net is fantastic. Corvette forums are great, but I can't recall them now. Subaru Forum is fantastic, humour though is needed. NASIOC.com priuschat is great, though it goes quite different from above forums. Tesla forums are good, but I can't recall any off the top of my hand. And then landcruiser ones, wrangler/jeep ones, etc.
The more less hobby a car is, the decrease in quality in forum posts, not that a corolla is a bad car per se, or even a camry/accord. It's just, different folks for different hobbies.
Spend a week on there, and you'll learn the lingo (it's universal throughout cars, especially per car generation/period, 70's/80's/90's,etc)
Then you also have other motorsports too, motorcycles and even planes, which share the same sentiment. Pilot chat/bicker is very similar. ;)
Mixing DOT-5 brake fluid with DOT-3/4 is always a fun one. Folklore is that it will poison children and kill puppies. Reality is that they are, by law, compatible and mixing won't do anything more than create a fluid with unknown boiling points, but this is true of mixing any two brake fluids (and it is true DOT-5 is not compatible with ABS brake systems, but that's a separate point).
Pretty much anything to do with turbos is another fun one, as many folks have no idea how turbos work but have lots of opinions on tuning them.
Anyway, the point is that the comradery is great on these forums, they're a lot of fun, and you can find good info, but don't take any info on them as gospel.
> Norman Garrett was the Concept Engineer for the original Miata back in his days at Mazda’s Southern California Design Studio
The author could be bullshitting (he's not) but how would anyone who's not driven vehicles that are decades beyond their design life know?
I think you just need to have driven a car from that era to understand this post and believe it -- the car doesn't neccessarily need to be that old. I had a '77 Civic in 1982 and it had many of these same "features" as his Porsche - any key (or screwdriver) could open the door or turn the ignition, it had a manual choke lever installed because the automatic choke didn't work, there was an art to pumping the gas pedal before starting in cold weather (there was a fine line between being able to start and flooding it), there was no clutch interlock (or it was broken) to prevent starting the car in gear, and a bunch of other quirks similar to his.
And it was only 5 years old.
edit: And the oil use! I'd forgotten about that until reading his post, I used to carry a few jugs of oil in the trunk since the car was using almost a quart per fillup, and many gas stations kept a display case of oil out by the pumps so you could easily buy a quart if you needed it. My current 7 year old car doesn't use any noticeable amount of oil between ~8000 mile oil changes.
Not to say one can't be hoodwinked from time to time, naturally, but for me it's not the "facts" that ring true. It's the joy and humor and love that is hard to fake.
The article is presented as a letter to a car thief, a preposterous proposition right up front. It is not presented as a repair guide or an "evaluate whether a 914 is worth buying" guide, so it's really only of interest for entertainment and nostalgia purposes.
There's literally zero chance I'll ever be in a conversation with someone and say aloud "Oh, Porsche owners call this Neverland," and have to worry about someone interrupting me with, "BS, I belong to a Porsche club and have never heard this nickname."
By trusting someone who has. Either trust a specific person or believe there is someone in the crowd who would say something.
Unfortunately the application was so unstable that any attempts to SQLI, or really send any kind of malformed request would simply crash the entire site for hours, presumably until an admin came and restarted the server. DoS wasn't included in the programme so I never won a bounty. I'm sure it could have been exploited, but it was simply so rickety and shoddy that I couldn't figure out how.
Security through instability?
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/xbugto...
It all went down in a heap and I felt very guilty for a few minutes until I realised that this infrastructure was so fantastically unstable that a TCP half-open (just a SYN packet!) could kill it stone dead. That's not my fault.
You can't blame the postman if knocking on the front door demolishes your building.
Among all the other security issues they had (easily gained a root shell via template injection, multiple XSS issues, CSRF, basically everything in the OWASP Top 10), to call their security posture Swiss cheese would be an understatement.
A couple months after my test, the entire project was scrapped.
Secure, Available, Unattended, choose any 2? You can have a secure&available app but you need to keep patching it. You can have an available&unattended app but it won't be secure. Or you can have a secure&unattended app, it will just need to crash a lot.
You want unattended servers? Fine. You want someone not to be able to steal the keys from a backup? We can do that too. You want the servers to be able to restart at 2 am without getting someone out of bed to come type a passphrase into a console on each server?
HSMs were quite expensive. People made any number of attempts to make them cheap and found out why they aren't (Ari Shamir has entered the chat), often a Too Good to be True scenario.
The engineering Puritan will want to know that the Webers are a retrofit, a hack for escape from the factory's refractory -- but cutting edge tech in the 70s! -- VW electronic fuel injection. The EFI "brain" was a box the size of a small modern laptop, stuffed with individual transistors, inductors, capacitors and resistors.
No one in North America, it seemed, had any idea how to diagnose an internal fault. The owner's options were to buy a secondhand brain taken from a junked car, presumably there for some other reason, or the Webers. Junkyard brains were refundable, but the several hours installing, testing, and possibly uninstalling were not, so careful deliberation was in order.
Access to the brain, like most engine compartment work on the 914, demanded the sort of agility, strength, and determination required of large-animal veterinarians, with access for most tasks from underneath, wedged as it was in a sort of triangular gap below and behind the seats and ahead of the rear trunk and transmission.
Previous owners could not figure out the issue. The car's engine would rev "bounce" at idle like it had a big cam, but it didn't go away when driving, making driving not very fun. So I got the Scirocco for dirt cheap.
I realized on day that if you opened and closed the hood a couple times, the issue would fix it self, and it was very repeatable.
I realized the computer is mounted next to the hood hinge!
I got lucky and just blindly resoldering all the joints in the computer fixed it.
We later swapped that 400k mile motor setup to a modern turbo motor with a sequential gearbox, and it's a rally car now. :)
(not super important to story but the "ECU" from 1982 was a bit more modern, Jetronic as it was called was "only" roughly the size of a few old TI-82s).
A lot of this article rings true for cars I've had (and some I still have) but I tend toward cars that are simpler mechanically and tend to fail more fundamentally: the keys all lock fine but the suspension mounts all rust out. This year has been an exercise in chasing leaks (gas, brake fluid, coolant, and now ATF) between my two daily classics. All I need is power steering fluid and I can complete the whole set!
I was confused by this until I searched for "Porsche 914 shift pattern" on Google Images. I guess it's a dog-leg gearbox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-leg_gearbox).
HN supports shift pattern unicode!
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Also, odd, but the Citroen M35 has a similar name and shift pattern, even though it's a car and completely unrelated.
https://ranwhenparkeddotnet.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/m352...
One rail is 1st/reverse. Another rail is 2nd/3rd and the last rail is 4th or OD and direct. Whether the "fore is a lower gear than aft" holds between the 2nd and 3rd rails is a function of whether or not it's a the pair of gears that constitute "forward gear on the right rail) will either be greater or less than 1:1 depending on if it's an overdrive transmission whereas the rear position on the right rail will always be direct for reasons that boil down to "that's the sensible way to build it".
There's not much to "figure out" when you have a direct lever that goes into the shifter.
I accidentally shifted from 1st straight into 5th quite a few times. The darn thing had so much torque that it wouldn’t even stall when you did that!
They should have had a throwaway scene where he tries to steal a Deuce from an armory and it comes up, "File Not Found."
Or he's throwing errors and has to reboot himself trying to find 4th.
I learned this driving my first car which was a similar vintage Karmann Ghia. It still did it out of habit twenty years later driving my stick-shift Jetta. The second YouTube video I found of someone learning to drive a KG was doing it instinctively as well. [1] I guess there's so much play you just learn to wig-wag a little to see if you're in gear or not.
My 77 Firebird has aftermarket shift and throttle cables.
Of course, my Firebird is an automatic, so who knows. Maybe a two cable system would do?
That is in part a secondary effect of how wide and crisp the offsets are between gears (how 'deep' the H shape is). On the gear boxes people tend to like, going from 2nd to 3rd, and 3rd to 4th take very close to the same time. On my little roadster I'd just stomp on the clutch and throw the gear knob in the general vicinity of where it needed to be, relying on hand-eye coordination and the synchros to do the real work (I missed maybe 3 shifts a year, and half of those when I was tired).
Compare this to the car I learned stick on - the infamous Chevy Citation, made during the nadir of Detroit - where the gearbox was roughly shaped like an X, although at the time it felt like an l. I lost track of how many times I accidentally upshifted instead of downshifted at a stop sign, and that engine had less torque than an electric pencil sharpener, so the engine would simple stall the moment I tried to let the clutch out.
The roadster I subsequently drove, I experimented and found that if I was even a little careful I could get moving from a dead stop in 3rd gear. Basically a modified tractor engine. All torque, no horsepower.
One thing I don't see mentioned is that you first have to press down onto the knob, then shift forward, in order to shift the transmission into R. Simply pushing the knob forward won't go from N to R.
On my old Jetta (left hand drive), it was more like "Up and to the Left a little bit", and not a straight throw from first.
"Standard?" Hmm. We have two cars with manual transmission, a VW Sharan and a VW Up:
The Sharan has R at the top left, then (reading across) 1 3 5 with 2 4 6 below; so 6th is at the bottom right.
The Up only has 5 forward gears, but for some reason they decided to put R at the bottom right (so down from 5th... you can probably see where this story is going)
I have once, and only once, been driving along at motorway speed in the Up, in 5th, and briefly thought I was in the Sharan, and started trying to change up to 6th, except the Up only has 5, and you're heading for R, not 6th. Happily I didn't complete the change...
Definitely burned out a clutch early from learning to drive and learning to drive stick at the same time, but damn do I miss it sometimes.
So I’m guessing this was one of the standard gear patterns in the late 70s / early 80s euros, back when car affordances were often nebulous concepts.
The 1->4 mistake OTOH, having drifted a little too far right in Neverland, was easily fallen into, and the shuddering deceleration that follows may have been the cause of a few rear-end collisions over the years.
1 2
R 3
I am eagerly awaiting the opportunity to stick this into docs or a tutorial someday. What a brilliant line that really captures that thrill of a newcomer to a problem feeling like they've accomplished something only to find the worst is yet to come.
I have a quick release wheel to deter the average opportunist from breaking my glass and ignition barrel, and with some wiring trickery and the bits I remove it's never going to start. It's aftermarket enough that stock parts won't help the thief, so unless they have a laptop, an aftermarket ECU, and a tuner handy, they probably won't get far.
Sucks to have to bother with all that, but alarms have never helped me, and you just can't fix woeful 90s physical security.
One attempt on my car was only foiled because when I park up at my girlfriends house, I remove some 90s era fuses you can't get anymore and take the box covers with me. A paperclip would work, but you've got to figure out that the specific fuses are missing first.
It's not about being perfect when it comes to car security, it's about being too much of a pain in the ass, so they'll give up and move on. Just like bicycle security.
Yeah, my Dad had a Ford F-100 that had a gear shift that would come out. He drove it to work and took the gear shift inside and left it in his locker. Not the best location (a town in Oregon in the 70's), but he never had any trouble with someone stealing his ride out of the parking lot. I still remember the sound of the gas sloshing in the tank behind the seat.
It isn't hidden or super secret. Just adds extra work and time for someone probably being stressed out already.
A friends' T3 was left in the middle of the road, because her gearbox was broken-ish and finding the reverse a learned skill. Halfway through turning her bus, thieves just gave up. She found her car perpendicular to the road in the morning.
At some point the solenoid died (or some other electrical component). So to start it, you'd have to reach under the car with a screwdriver (or some other piece of metal, but I kept a screwdriver in the car for this purpose), and short out across two terminals.
You then had 10-20 seconds to get out from under the car, into the driver's seat, and turn the key. As a practiced manouver, it was pretty quick.
Contemporary GM solenoids were integrated into the starter motor and were a real pain to get to. Certainly not impossible to do the screwdriver trick but far less convenient with needing to crawl around on the ground and all. Being located right next to the exhaust headers also meant they were easily susceptible to heat soak problems which would cause a failure to activate - especially if you have a hot-running high performance engine. It was actually a pretty common and easy mod on those GMs to use a Ford solenoid and bypass the one on the starter motor.
hahaha. This whole time I was thinking "I know the car is lovely, but this is why people love Miatas"
Reliable, fun, and economical. The only thing they lack is practicality, being a two-seater with a small trunk. But if you don't have to worry about carrying kids or cargo, they're great cars!
edit: just got to the author’s blurb at the bottom. He was an engineer on the original Miata, so it’s no surprise that he knows what he’s talking about.
The fact that they are dog slow is made up by the fact that your sitting on this little motor making a huge racket. Its the "I must be going fast, given how much noise i'm hearing" thing.
I remember one guy who would always show up in a Porsche 914 with racing tires, and he would run circles around us amateurs.
I knew a guy that was an incredible mountain biker, won all the races he entered etc. He used to show up with crappy bikes probably 10lbs heavier than everyone else... he'd still win. Sometimes you either have it or you don't, and all the equipment in the world won't help you.
Does it begin with J and end with Y? (I'm a London-based bean!)
Left my MGB in the dust, of course
Electronics won’t be the Achilles heel of old cars. Gasoline will be. But make no mistake. Old electric vehicles with their max 10-year life span of battery banks won’t enjoy the life of a classic either.
step 1. prepare a usb with files needed to jailbreak the car and be able to connect to your wifi
step 2. setup a home network with dns/ntp and a reverse engineered tesla server that will authorize the car to work
step 3 set date to reasonable values that the car will accept
step 4 do some button dances to start the car from the usb
…
ill leave the rest to your imagination
Eventually I cut a hole in the floor and welded a shifter direct to the transmission.
On the plus side, I learned so much about how cars work that I can fix a lot of things now. My personal peak was going from “uh-oh, the alternator on the Oldsmobile died” to having replaced it with a new one from the store in 43 minutes.
I can't believe you managed to do that for a month.
1. https://ibb.co/CMW3SdS (I sold it over a decade ago.)
Dopey young me with the car: https://imgur.com/a/hbRLpO2
A lot of the article is about "you'll never find 2nd" which is in large part to the weird shifting pattern. Reverse is where first usually is, first is where second usually is and the rest are in a kind of off by one pattern from there. This was actually considered a feature since supposedly it allows the driver to make the shift from first to second faster.
The vagueness of the stick is very true and something every 914 owner can relate to. Those first couple weeks you spend some time hunting for the right slot. I went from first to fifth many times before a muscle memory was developed and I didn't have to think about it.
If someone really wants to buy the old Porsche, send me a message.
1966 Fleetwood 75 - If it's sat for more than three weeks: Stab to set choke. Crank, pausing every 10 seconds...it's got a LONG way to pump the fuel and you don't want to overheat the starter. Car will then, if driven weekly, start on the first half of the first crank every time. Battery has gone 14 months without a tender or external charge and continues to start the car just fine.
More programs should be run like that. Set a goal, create a program, then periodically evaluate if the goal is still the same and if the program is effective.
The state strongly encouraged me to send it to a Golden Shield mechanic. As part of the work, they "checked" the air intake filter and MAF sensor on the engine, which was, of course, filthy. It sits in a big plastic box on that car. Instead of reinstalling the filter, they jammed it in sideways and closed the box. I figured it out later, and spent about an hour picking bits of leaves out of the downstream air intake.
Of course, this cost 95% of the limit past which California gives you a free pass till the next smog inspection. (And almost 2x the market value of the car.)
I'm convinced the whole thing is a make-work program that's holding our air quality hostage. (And I'm strongly for tightening emissions standards!)
Any kind of policing is self-denying. You can't evaluate it while it's being applied.
https://www.ncdot.gov/dmv/title-registration/emissions-safet...
There's also an emissions inspection that varies by county, but vehicles older than 20 years are exempt.
https://www.ncdot.gov/dmv/title-registration/emissions-safet...
Does it make any sense to exempt older vehicles that are most likely to fail these inspections? No, of course it doesn't.
New vehicles within the most recent 3 model years are also exempt.
This hardly matters though because you don't need to register the vehicle in the state you're living in.
The fact that you start your comment with "in the US" when anyone even slightly familiar with the place knows that pretty much everything about it is a state by state deal is a massive red flag for a comment that serves no purpose but to convert pearl clutching into internet virtue points. The fact that you end your comment with a back handed quip deriding some imagined notion of freedom more or less confirms it.
I one had to leave it in a parking lot and later have it towed while I was at work. The tow truck driver could not figure out how to get it started even with me walking him through it on the phone! The ignition is 'wiggly' where it won't start until you jiggle the steering wheel to allow the key to turn to start the car. Also a screwdriver will work fine (if you wiggle the steering wheel just right while attempting to turn the ignition). So ya, Similar quirks :).
I love our westy and usually take it to the beach to surf. It also has an old air-cooled 914 pancake engine in it.
Once you had driven it for a while you got to know the "feel" of it and had no problems, but like in the article someone new to driving it would have had a really hard time lol.
It's kind of sad that a lot of younger folks won't have this kind of experience. Muscling a 1973 Ford F150 around with no power steering, I learned many, many things about driving. Having to do hill starts with a 3-on-the-tree, I learned many, many more.
A recalcitrant, finicky, or otherwise nearly broken car is a source of much distress, but also character building. And often a source of many fond rememberances--albeit far, far in the future.
...because there's a solid chance the car will talk back.
Welcome to the future! Your car will sass you, and you will like it!
[giggle] This reminds me of putting my Toyota 4x4 (Hilux) in 4-Low, First gear, pressing the Clutch Start Cancel switch and turning the ignition key, making it an electric vehicle for a few seconds. The starter was powerful enough to move the truck uphill in that gear on its own until the engine started.
I appreciate the design from another era - mechanical simplicity from when folks weren't concerned about maximizing efficiency, thin window frames and door pillars that would fare embarrassingly in a modern crash test, etc. Sure, it doesn't fit the standards of today, but that's why these older cars are so different - they're literally from a different era.
Occasionally I'll go down an Internet rabbithole and imagine buying a 60s muscle car or series Land Rover or what have you. But then I'll be near a decades-old machine on the street and be overwhelmed by the smell of the exhaust. I think I must be more sensitive to it than others, but that mostly kills that idea for me. I guess I could try swapping in a modern, emissions-controlled drivetrain but that's a whole 'nother yak to shave.
I had a 1972 Triumph Bonneville which had a "tickler" button on each carb instead of a choke. That meant to start it up you would press each tickler button until a bit of gas shot out invariably on your hand but also the engine and the sometimes hot exhaust. Only after this ritual was performed could you jump on the kickstart (no electric start). So you end up smelling like gas.
Q: Why to the British drink warm beer? A: Because Lucas makes electrics.
Immensely better for visibility, though. Which was actually a plus for safety compared to now, when a pedestrian can well be entirely hidden by your own windscreen pillar.
Frankly I'm more intrigued by the fact that this seems to have gotten an easy #1 spot on hn. Writing about sketchy clutches on old cars does not generally attract wide hn acclaim.
I'd love to hear opinions as to what made the difference...clearly something here is different.
I’m a long-time project car builder and this post strikes all the chords of a labor of love.
Clever content, technical concepts but written in plain english, relishing in the almost hostile user experiences that some engineering can produce. It smacks of everything HN is to me.
I have a '95 Rover 216 Coupe which is mechanically very solid (Honda engine and running gear) and very well maintained, but the rest of the car is full of quirks caused by age deterioration. The numerous "rituals" include things like never closing your frameless door with the window down (a nasty cracking sound follows), manually pulling the tooth of the release latch before closing the boot, care when washing it so not to let water enter the spare wheel area permanently and cause rust, etc.
I don't think I hate another human enough to wish diagnosing an intermittent ground problem that only occured when the temperature fell below 30F on them.
Character it may build, but even to this day I would trade that character for fewer knuckle scars and fewer hours with numb hands from the cold.
I'll take my modern car that lasts until some idiot hits me and totals it.
Lucas, the manufacturer of many MG parts, colloquially known as ‘the Prince of Darkness’ because of a tendency for the lights to suddenly stop working.
The tell-tale crimp in many trunk lids, caused by attempting to shut it without disengaging the little rod that kept it open.
Don’t bother locking the doors if you don’t want the expensive convertible top sliced through.
The battery is behind the passenger seat.
Having the reverse gear go out leads to an interesting perspective change while parking/driving.
I ended up going to votech in auto mechanics because of this car, because I got so irritated about getting ripped off.
Ah well, I love the damn thing. Even now, 10 years after I sold it.
1. The "springs" under the seats were bent wood slats (my dad and I put in new carpeting and found that one out when we removed the seats).
2. The heater was literally sliding a door to the engine way down the foot well. I remember several winter top down drives in the Midwest where my face and hands were frozen but my legs felt like they were being branded.
3. The manual choke.
4. The small cascade of water in your face when you drove in the rain and took a corner.
5. The electric 5th that seemed to break every few months.
All good memories though.
My Dart, an ol' 4 door from '69 has this really cool thing were in the event you do get the cruel idea to wake her up on a cold morning; you'll end up doing three sets of ignition on, wait 3-5 seconds, ignition off, pump the gas pedal a few times (first set 20, then 10, then 5) and if you haven't deviated from this formula you should be able to start the engine. After about 3 seconds she will be quietly resting once more, then you can attempt to wake her again, this time once you hear the engine come to life you need to ease onto the accelerator, and hold it at an obnoxiously loud "idle" for about 1-2 minute. Then from there you will put her in first, and while still tickling the accelerator, release the brake slowly (this girl is a TorqueFlite auto transmission).
Though i love that car because i drove it as my daily for several months during the cold winter... it had no heater, no defrost and no hope of going highway speeds safely (though I have flown at 80 mph before, down a hill in neutral, that was terrifying), you have to bleed the brakes once every two months or she will try to kill you.. and she's unapologetically mine, for fear of the guilt I would incur if i sold her to someone that she accidentally ends up killing and my undying love for a car that usually got me to where i need to be (12 mpg, 91 oct).
Even electric motor conversions in older cars are coming along as seen here https://youtu.be/qpcSF1kRcFY?t=55
The starter did not work. This meant parking on a hill always and 'pop starting.' You put it in 2nd gear, get a good rolling start, then crank the engine. Be mindful to not run out of runway.
This was alleviated after a year or two when a friend of my mom showed me how to arc the starter directly. Pop the hood, take a screw driver and connect the two opposing bolts on the starter. A shower of sparks and a section of screwdriver missing later and, boom, a running engine. It was true freedom not having to park on a hill anymore!
You couldn't start or stop too fast. The bench seat's lock failed, so the entire bench seat would shift forward or backward if you changed velocity too quickly. A tight seat belt helped by using you to keep the seat back.
The driver side window went halfway down... usually. You had to press against it just right and you had to pull up on it to help the hand crank lift it. Best to just leave it up.
Onto the instruments. On a hard left hand turn, the radio and dashboard would light up ... until the end of the turn. Otherwise, no dash lights and no radio. The other problem with the left hand turn was that if it was too sharp, the keys would fly from the ignition and land on the passenger floor board. But that was ok because the truck would continue to run.
Turning on the headlights would cause the gas gauge to drop to zero. This was a problem at night since due to the lack of dash lights. To check the gas, you had to turn off the headlights and use a flashlight to see the fuel level.
Thinking of levels of fluids: oil. There was no dip stick and it burnt oil. So you mostly guessed daily how much oil to add based on experience. Somehow it never occurred to me to, you know, purchase a dip stick. I grew up poor, you didn't just buy things. And I didn't think to make a makeshift one because I was inexperienced at life with little guidance.
One night in 16 degree fahrenheit, icy weather, and not dressed for said weather, the truck gave up the ghost. I didn't estimate my remaining oil correctly and seized the engine. The wrecker gave me $35 for the truck and drove off into the sunset the following day.
① it was '83, not '85 (and thus air-cooled);
② it was an aftermarket camper van conversion with some slight design issues in the pop top, not a Westfalia;
③ after I rebuilt the engine a second time we sold it, so, blessedly, it's not mine anymore. My engine rebuild survived for a couple of years until the new owner drove it in second gear for an hour at highway speeds, overheating the engine to the point where it punched a pushrod through the crankcase.
|–|–|
①③④
Huh HN lets me approximate the shift pattern of a deuce.5
One time, someone broke into one of the Ladas. No problem for us, it was hard to start even with a key and the would-be auto thief apparently couldn’t get it going. Who needs an alarm?
I would choose an Audi/BMW if I wanted that sort trepidation in my life.
I now drive a '21 Camry and man, it's just nice. Things work. I mean, I don't mind pulling things apart, but it's like, do I really want to run Gentoo constantly if I don't budget 4-6 hours/mo to maintain it? (no)
Met a guy that threw a V8 in one of these - must have been absolutely insane.
The best was when I got out of this tiny car with manual everything and drove the land-yacht Pontiac Parisienne we used for driver's ed in highschool. Its brakes were so sensitive, and I was so used to having to use a LOT of force to stop the TR4, that the first few times I'd stop the car everybody's seatbelt would lock up.
A lot of 1970's manual transmission cars were like this. I had an early 70's AMC Gremlin. The shift knob was just a vertical rectangular rod. The transmission linkage were two parallel horizontal rods with a notch cut in each. The vertical rod just floated between these, and you had to pull left or right and slide back or forth until you found one of the notches - then once you were engaged, you could push or pull the linkage to go into a gear. When the knob drifted, you really had to have a visual in your head of where the notches were and what gear you where in.
Though it’s usually my goal to chase all manner of unreliability out of a car I own (I confess, I absolutely love just getting in a car and driving, no fuss, no muss), there is a pang of sadness that comes with knowing I’ve made it that much more reliable, and frankly, boring.
I do appreciate the physical aesthetics of older devices and would not vandalize functional and maintainable internals unless they caused extreme hardship.
The clapped out heap of junk has an integrity, and dignity, worthy of respect. This car should most properly be exhibited on blocks in the front yard, surrounded by tall grass, possibly with a tree beginning to grow out of it somewhere.
Between a trophy and a salute to both the soul of the machine itself and the many people who made it. "Well done thou good and faithful servant"
It should be a habitation for dogs.
At this point that car needs to be completely disassembled to bare metal, power washed, welding repaired, sandblasted, repainted, and totally rebuilt. With so much damage all that remains is nothing but hospice care.
Excellent writing.
The odds of a car thief in 2022 in a modern American city being old enough to be in the age cohort that knows how to drive stick are minimal.
Probably more secure than the class-5 alarm on my current car :)
This was a great read, thank you.
Inquiring mind wants to know, push rods or overhead cams?
According to Wikipedia, the 914 could have either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_914#Technical_specific...
I consider personally most automatic transmissions horrible. The gear is either to high to overtake or so low that the engine is running with too much RPM. The only exception is the gear-less Multitronic[1] by Audi. Sadly replaced by DSG. Nasty rumors say VW did that because the Multitronic had no more issues and worked well ;)
The DSG works somehow and the shifting is somehow acceptable. The automatic transmission Ford uses (e.g. C-Max) is horror for the driver, passengers and the engine. Adventurous people may proceed to double-clutching[2].
The car in question is at least 45 years old. That the transmission was never great and has degraded since is not at all odd. At no point did I see ragging on a manual, only the transmission being shot (and having a weird pattern).
Good cars have good transmissions, regardless of transmission style.
The ZF8 is an excellent transmission that's seen everywhere.
PDK does justice to the most performant modern Porsches in a way that manuals struggle to keep up with.
Even relatively small volume DCTs like the one in the 4C are pretty great these days.
btw. ZF means Zahnradfabrik Friedrichshafen. Which is owned by the Zeppelin Foundation. Which was founded to support the built of Zeppelin Luftschiffe and social purposes. Weird story. And the Zeppelin Foundation was for a long time owner of Cherry. The company behind most mechanical keyboard switches. They should've kept that, growing business area - mechanical switches ;)
Japanese ones have always been smooth and fun.
Source: I taught three teenagers to drive stick recently, and there are still teeth on the gears. Yay me!
It is always entertaining to see European exceptionalism schooling up people in car forums. Please tell us about diesel engines too!
That is nothing new to a true European. Look up the Renault 4 shifter :-)
This resonates with me: I've got an old, kinda beaten up, "sister" of that 914: an old Porsche 911. I've got it since 22 years and it's 33 years old atm (so 2/3rd of its life with me). Over the decades I only ever put oil and gasoline in that thing (ok, ok, the fuel pump died once and it was a 100 EUR part). Every single time I hook the battery up, it starts... While doing some blue smoke, granted. Although back from 1999 to 2004 I drove this beauty daily, since 2004 it's a garage queen: a piece of art that hardly ever hits the road. It's also prevented from seeing any kind of water: no rain water, no cleaning water (I much rather scratch the paint a tiny bit with microfibers towels and "dry cleaning" detailers or whatnots than risk having water idling for months in some sneaky spot and create corrosion).
Original paint (hardly anyone still has this). First clutch (yup: same clutch since 33 years): this one is so rare it's actually problematic because my MY has a clutch that's not made anymore and there's some modification that needs to be done... But not a single mechanic know anymore what needs to be done to adapt a "still made" clutch on mine (basically a 1988/1989 clutch will not work on a 1987 if the 1987 is still on its first clutch for it hasn't seen the mandatory mod done). Tires are from... 2004 (yes it's illegal and, no, I don't care seen how I drive it). About twice a year, on a non-rainy day, the old lady starts and goes for a drive around the block at 20 mph. And then back into the garage.
One day I should probably have it restored: the problem is these old Porsche engines (all 911 pre the 993 model) are notorious for their long bolts breaking when trying to adjust the timing. So a restoration means taking the engine out. That'd set me $10K easily I think with all that needs to be done.
And in the end I'll have a polluting gas-guzzler which I'll feel bad using anyway.
No really: old cars are also great as art pieces that hardly ever go out.
Some people like to collect them, others like to drive them, others like to restore them (met a gentleman the other day whose passion was neither driving nor collecting but restoring incredible cars). I'm sure some even like to write about them!
And don't get me started on my even crankiest old italian car! (this one won't shift into 2nd when the gearbox is cold, so it's 1st to 3rd gear during the first x minutes of driving... But being italian, of course, it's not starting anymore and needs to go see a mechanic).
As I'm a recovering petrolhead I begin to see these more and more as art pieces: weird remnants of an insanely dangerous (and polluting) past.
The Porsche 911 Yellow Bird 50fps hot lap around the Nürburgring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzjQXxktxbs
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https://web.archive.org/web/20220401144722/https://www.hager...
Amazing the breadth of preconceived notions that can be leveraged with a badge on a grill. Having the presence of mind and ability to leverage readership demographics like this is what really separates good writers and editors from the mediocre.
A better comparison to the Porsche 914 would be an MG roadster - or if you want to stick with Chrysler, then a Dodge Omni GLH. By modern standards both of these are unreliable, uncomfortable, and hard to drive, but like the 914 they are celebrated by enthusiasts. Part of the reason is because despite their flaws, and despite being relatively hard to drive, they reward skill. While slow to accelerate, they handle well - allowing a skilled driver to make good lap times on a track.
... does this sound to anyone else like he's basically got a Permissive Action Link protecting his car?
This was the only text that was visible below the title and author byline.
It's funny because I had very similar issues. In my case the gearshift link bar fell out of the bottom twice. Both cases I was parked in a high-security area at work and I had get special authorisation for the road service. To much amusement of the security staff, especially the second time which was about a week after the first.
Also, the lights would not auto switch off when turning off the ignition (no fancy newfangled electronics there!), but my colleagues were willing to give me a push once a week or so. All the above did give my car a very special reputation at work and it was the butt of many jokes. It also had a manual choke which caused me to empty many a fuel tank unnecessarily. I carried a 5L jerrycan around after the first time I found out what happens if you forget to switch the choke off after starting. With the choke off it would go more than 100km on this reserve!
The ignition switch was also so far gone it could be turned with a teaspoon, but unfortunately this worked both ways. Sometimes going over a bump in the road would flick it off. So for this reason I hotwired the foglight switch (which was rarely allowed to be used in the Netherlands, you may only use it in basically undrivable conditions) as an "ignition on" switch to bridge it. In this sense it was like a modern car which you can turn on with a button. For the foglight itself I just had two wires hanging under the dash which I could simply connect when needed. No need for this modern "switch" nonsense.
There was also no power steering nor braking and the engine (1.0L) was so small you could literally set foot inside the engine compartment (standing on the road as it didn't have a bottom). My father hated me for braking so hard when I drove his car, but on mine you really had to pump it if you had any hope of stopping. Steering was super light though, even without power steering. Probably because the car weighed practically nothing, and the tyres could use a bit more grip. When I had people sitting in the back I literally had trouble steering at high speeds because there wasn't enough weight on the front. So I would limit myself to 80km/h on the motorway in those cases to be safe. It did have no trouble reaching 120km/h though, to my surprise.
I also had to make sure not to fuel up above 80% or so because when splashing it leaked somewhere around the neck of the fuel filler pipe and the smell was horrible.
Still, it was MY car. My friends bought me a bumper sticker saying "Laugh all you want, this one is paid off!". It was also special in the sense that it was the only car I've had where the (Sony) stereo was worth more than the car itself. It was one of the first with a CD player. Not that it was particularly expensive, but you probably gathered that the car was even cheaper.
PS: Funnily enough it passed the safety inspection twice. I did have to wire the foglight switch back up before the test though O:-)
Signed, The Thief"
Very creative malapropism!
Several rabbit-holes in Linux have tested my patience less than that
You buy it with a trivial occasional issue that can be worked around, and the issue gradually starts happening more and more often and getting harder and harder to work around. And at the same time, another trivial issue will develop....
That's how my motorcycle went from 'needs to be kick-started' through 'sometimes it takes a few tries', through 'bump starting works though', to 'you can bump start it within 6 attempts', to 'you can bump start it within 6 attempts, as long as you didn't use the headlights too much last time you rode it'
What do MOTs say about antique cars? I've had some really rough old Minis pass the MOT in the past.
Great read.
I doubt anyone from Hagerty is reading this but genuinely thank you for making the car content you do. Automotive journalism sometimes feels like a dying industry but you give me hope.
As a reformed air-cooled VW enthusiast, these are my natural driving tendencies.