Carrera To China, lift off

We finally decided to do something about the shabby electrics in our car. We had a non-working rear light, and some fuses kept popping. After disconnecting every little electrical appliance, we traced the faulty wiring to the rear engine compartment. We dismantled the whole rear loom, and compared it to the electrical scheme for our car we found online. We also checked the condition of every wire and replaced bad/worn cables. We also had one broken relay switch (rear window heating realy).

After mounting the whole loom back in the car, we still had one fuse popping every time we put on the lights. We opened up the front headlight buckets and found some crappy repairs from a previous owner. We replaced the standing-lights wires, and rerouted them through a new little hole in the chassis.

Everything now works like it should.

In this winterpreparation we decided to change the suspension as well, and our trusty sponsor Steven has donated 4 brand new Bilstein shocks and a Weltmeister Cambermeister to us! Thanks alot Steven, it's really appreciated! Before we could mount the 4 new shocks, we needed to change one of our front struts from a Koni setup to the original Boge strut (which we found at the local breaker). This process was quite straightforward, and we encountered little difficulties doing this. We used a special tool to open up the balljoint. We also had to take off the caliper and front brakelines, so that meant bleeding the front brakes again afterwards.

The installation of the front strut inserts is quite easy, the only problem is the realignment afterwards, which we are going to leave to our mechanics. The inserts simply slide in the strut, after having put a bit of oil in them (to keep them from moving in the strut, and making lots of noise).

The rear suspension is even more straightforward: it's a simple bolt-in. Jack up the car a little to take off the pressure, loosen up two bolts, take out old broken shock, insert new bilstein shock, and voila, you're done.

The car has risen now quite a few cms higher. The old shocks were really worn. It rides a whole lot better as well: it absorbs the bumps in the road way better, and seems to track a lot more accurately. Fantastic!

After we changed out the front suspension, it was time to mount the Weltmeister Cambermeister. This is a device which connects the tops of the two front shock towers, and should give extra strength and rigidity to our chassis. It should also make our steering more accurate.

The installation of this device is very easy, and after an hour or so, we were already done. We can now dial in extra negative or positive camber by adjusting the cambermeister.

People on the street were starting to notice it: the penetrating essence of a flat-six followed by a grey fog. Knowing that we have about 20.000 miles ahead of us, it seemed advisable to do something about this. A revised engine that could replace ours was found and yesterday and the preparation was started by garage Criel: removing engine and clutchplates, looking for parts to be replaced as well. Result: shuttling between the garage and Joma parts (90min drive back and forth) to buy pressure plate kit (clutch), bushings, seals, spark plugs, etc.
But at least the result will be even more trustworthy than our current engine. The replacement will have hydraulic chain tensioners, a revised cylinder head, new pistons, distributor, clutch pressure plate kit,...
I just can't wait untill we can drive our P911T an listen to the roaring howl of the engine.

We just received the car, and the new engine purrs like a kitten! It's much quieter than the old one, and starts much easier. We have to break it in first though, so no full throttle for a while still.







for more info, please visit: www.carreratochina.com

Great post!

What a cool project. I wish you all the best. Have fun.

Keep us all informed on here please.

Your site is interesting too.

When we received the car with the new engine, we still had one problem from before: we had strange starting behaviour: it cranked fine, but wouldn't catch. Only when you let the key go back into the 'on' position, the engine caught!

Our first thought was a faulty/worn ignition switch, so we decided to take it out of the car and open it up. We didn't find anything suspicious in the lock, apart from some 40-year-old grease, but other that that, it looked very good! We cleaned and greased it, and mounted it back into the car.

The problem couldn't be in the wiring, because we revised the whole rear loom some time back. On to the ignition parts then: we switched coils and RPM transducers but nothing. The last possible cause was the CDI: it still whined, but could be faulty anyway.

We loaned a Permatune CDI and an original Bosch CDI from some very friendly Porsche enthousiasts, and tried it out: with the Permatune box the engine ignited a couple of times but not enough to have it run. Then we plugged in the Bosch CDI, and the car started right away!

So we knew the culprit then: a broken CDI, probably caused by riding with the wrong coil for a couple of months (the coil we received in Italy). So we sent the cDI off for repairs.

We didn't want to be immobilised though, so we decided to alter our ignition to the old 'Kettering' ignition (simple coil and distributor) and ride like that for a while. We bought a correct coil, and changed the wiring accordingly. The car started right away, and actually runs equally as fine as with the CDI...we haven't checked it at high RPM's yet though, because we're still running the engine in.

Anyway, we have learned a whole lot from this, and found a way to reduce the number of things that can breakdown during our trip and still be OK ;-)

Suspension adjustments

We made a big step towards our travelplans this week, by adjusting the wheels and suspension.

We swapped the aluminium fuchs wheels (with lowprofile tires) with much sturdier original porsche steel wheels. We have put heavy duty reinforced snowtires on these

rims, which will give us the necessary load capacity and strength. This gave us 2cms gain in rideheight right away.

Next on the list was a rideheight change, and a corner balance.

Front first: i turned the torsion bar adjustment bolts to the max, and went for a testdrive. Afterwards, i checked the left-right balance with the tripod method.

There was a difference of 1cm in rideheight, and i adjusted it accordingly.

At the rear there's more work involved to raise the car: you have to reindex the torion bars. This means putting more 'preload' on the bars by turning them in one

direction. This was my modus operandi:
- raise the car on the bridge
- loose the wheels
- take off the torsion bar protection caps
- raise the arm slightly so you can remove the shock from the arm.
- the arm now drops completely, with almost no tension on it (full droop). Take out the two excentric adjustment bolts and the two bolts that hold the springplate

to the arm.
- take off the springplate, and pray to god that the torsion bar stays in the car. I was 50% lucky. On one side, the torsion bar stuck to the springplate, and as

there is no way of putting force on it to pull it out, i opted to drill a hole in the center of the springplate 'bushing', and knock the torsion bar out of it. This

took a whole lot of force, because the bar was almost rusted solid in the bushing.
- I cleaned up the torsion bars with a wire brush and greased them up with lithium grease, and made sure they slid nice and smoothly in their bushings. The splines

were in good condition, and i checked if there were any scratches on the cars. I lubed the bars up with plenty of lithium grease.
- Then it was time to choose the position of the bars. I had put the car perfectly horizontal on the bridge, so i could simply measure the height of the springplate

to the ground. I did this before too. I chose to let the bottom point of the springplates drop around 3,5cms, so i would get around 5cms ride height increase. I did

it this way because i don't have a tool to measure the angle of the springplates. Anyway, i think my method is at least as accurate.
- i mounted everything back up, went for another testdrive, and came back with this conclusion: One side was still 1,5cms higher than the other side, so maybe

there's some difference in the strength of the torsion bars, or the car is not perfectly symmetrical.
- I reindexed one side again, did another testrun, and this time, both sides were within 2mm of eachother. I was more than happy!

Because we added so much ride height (6cms in total!), the wheels were completely out of alignment: the camber was waaaay positive on all wheels, and should be

around neutral or slightly negative to be good.

I decided to hand it over to the professionals, and went to a pro tire shop. Together with the mechanic, i aligned the complete car in about 2 hours. We maxed out

on the rear camber settings, and got an almost neutral figure luckily enough. (so, if i had put the car any higher still, we wouldn't have been able to set the

camber anymore, lucky!) It's a couple of minutes off, but im' not worried about that. We got the toe within spec. This car is meant to be driven very easily on the

street, so no need for big negative camber for us!

On the front, we easily got the camber set (0°) with the help of our cambermeister, and adjusted the toe afterwards. Caster was above max, but once again, not

worreid about that.

The car now looks and feels completely different: it's got a more classic look now, with the steel wheels, and the ride is much much improved!! It feels very light,

and steers very fast! At the same time we lost the nervosity feeling on the highway, and griplevels are drastically improved (we ran very old rubber on the fuchs

rims ). The heavy duty tires do not disturb the ride; the car feels comfy but still doesn't wallow when cornering. I'm very happy!

we're ready for our sponsortrip to England!!

As i experienced a little fire under the dashboard in England, i thought it might be time to take a closer look at the wiring of our beloved yellow sportscar.

I set out to redo the whole front wiring loom, including the fusebox, and inspect the wiring in and under the dashboard, and replace everything that looks suspicious.

As it goes with moost of our projects, i started with a little side-project to kick off the electrical repairs: i decided to give our VDO clock a closer look. Our clock worked only intermittently, and in the never-ending pursuit of a complete working car, i thought it would be nice if this beautiful little 60's clock would work again.

An article in the Pelican Parts technical knowledge base pointed me in the right direction: in 40 years time, a lot of crud and dust crawled it's way into the tiny guts of the clock, and jams it...i opened up the clock, and played with the gears a bit to understand the way it works. Every couple of minutes, the clock gets a shot of current from the battery, which loads one of the gears, which then gradually ticks back to zero, untill another shot of current gets things going again. I watched the cycle a couple of times, and noticed that the mechanism jammed up about halfway through the cycle. I sprayed the whole thing generously with electrical cleaner/contact spray, and saw a lot of filth dripping out of the guts. I blew everything dry, and started the mechanism again, and yepp, this time the clock would run through it's entire cycle. Easy fix!

A second little project was the install of our repaired CDI unit in the engine compartment. On my trip to England, i met up with Tim Bennet, who has a lot of experience in repairing these CDI boxes, and he was so kind to test our unit and change the faulty thrystor in it. Tim was so kind to do this FOC for us, and we will test the new type of thrystor for him. Thanks Tim!!!

I hooked up the CDI, together with an appropriate coil - designed to work with a CDI - and cleaned up all the wires in the engine compartment. It's very tidy back there again, and more so, the car started right up, and ran a lot smoother than before on the old-school kettering ignition. No testdrive just yet, because i had other fish to fry first.

Next on the list was the complete dismantling of the front wiring loom, together with the main fusebox. As you can clearly tell, the whole thing looked aweful, and was actually very dangerous too...i don't want our car to burn out!!

I carefully took all the wiring out of the fusebox, and made notes of what went where. The sight of a bundle 30 loose wires is a bit frightning at first, but i guess you get used to it. I compared everything with the 1969 electrical diagram, and to my surprise 99% of the wiring was still stock!

The front headlight loom showed it's age the most: insultion melted, wires corroded, bad connections, some stripped cables, etc...i decided to rebuild it. I kept the original round connector blocks, and connected a brand new self-made loom to it. Not the original colors, OK, but these are very hard to find, and i will just draw an updated diagram using my colors. I am very happy with The finished product (see picture): all the connections are neatly soldered and crimped, and protected with heatshrink. I even tested the resistance on all the wires before continuing.

With this project out of the way, i tackled the fusebox-problem: at first i wanted to convert it to more modern push-type fuses, but i wasn't really happy with the quality of the fuseboxes i bought, so i looked out for another solution. I found the perfect solution in the mounting of a mid-year 911 style fusebox. This box is much better protected, and looks so much tidier than the 2 old little birds' nests hanging from the chassis wall in the early cars...A big thank you goes out to Filip from FG Porsche (one of our biggest sponsors) who promptly gave me a midyear-box for free! Thanks Filip!

I cut all the original wires a couple of cms short, untill i found nice 'n' shiny copper, pre-soldered them, and hooked them up to the new fusebox. I put in an extra relay as well for the soon to be mounted Hella Fog lights. I also added one extra circuit for all our gadgets in the car (satnav, laptop, mobile phones, etc...).

In the meantime i also changed the worn battery cable with a brand new one, together with two brand new battery pole connectors. I will also look out for a more durable solution for the protection of the positive poles from shorting out against the chassis: a piece of bicycle inner tube with some duct tape over it doesn't look very safe to be honest ;-)

I was expecting some fuses to blow, or maybe a little bit of a burning smell here and there , but when i tried to start the car, everything went perfectly as planned, and the car fired right up, and all the electrics were working!

More to come in part 2 of the electrical works!

We got our first visa in! Pakistan and India are already OK.

Also, our Carnet de Passage has just arrived!!

Carrera To China Lift Off!!

Dear friends,

As you might know, we (Jan & Erwin) will leave on the trip of our lifetime on Sunday 30 November 2008.

You will be able to follow our adventures on our trusty website www.Carreratochina.com , and we will make sure the updates will be plentyfull and detailed!

We would like to invite you to our 'Car-Trek: Lift-Off' party, which is held the evening before our departure. Here are the details:


Where: NH Hotel Gent Belfort, Hoogpoort 63, 9000 Ghent, BELGIUM.

When: Saturday 29 November 2008, from 20u00.

Who: family, friends, supporters...everyone is welcome!!

Entry: Free.

What: meet the adventurers and the their little yellow sportscar...of course with some food and drinks, and a bit of music.

Dresscode: none (of course ;-) )


You are also welcome to wave us goodbye on our official departure, from the Sint-Pieters-square in Ghent Centre, Belgium, on Sunday 30 November 2008, at 10 a.m.

If needed, it is possible to stay overnight in the NH Hotel. Underground parking is available. Click here for booking info and details:
http://www.nh-hotels.com/nh/en/hote...tml?nhagentid=10166&nhsubagentid=101660000000

In attachment you will find our official invitation!

Hopefully we'll see you there!

Kind regards,
Jan & Erwin

Oh yeah,

we will do a pré-start from the Paintshield HQ in Grantham, Licolnshire on Saturday 29 November 2008, probably at 10a.m. or so. We will update when we have more details!!

cheers,
jan