I was texting @LI-Rick a couple of days back, and became aware that I hadn't ever posted regarding the work I did on the clown car over the winter and spring. I like reading posts about what people are doing, but I hate putting them together.
Regardless, here it is. It's long.
As you probably don’t remember... on the opening day of the TdS last year, I hit a pothole the size of a moon crater and broke a piece of my rear suspension.
Intermeccanicas have a tube frame, and the rear torsion tube is split in two halves and not continuous across the entire car. The nosecone of the transaxle nestles between the break. This makes possible a very clever arrangement. The torsion tubes on the inboard side (at the center of the car) on either side of the transaxle are not splined.
Instead, there is an arm with a grub-screw attached which is welded to a collar with internal splines which accept the splines of the torsion bars. The O/D of this collar is a slip fit inside the torsion tube. The splines grab the end of the torsion bar, the collars float in the ends of the torsion tube, the lever keeps it from moving, and the grub-screw adjusts preload (a picture would be worth a thousand words here, but I didn't take any ) allowing ride-height adjustment with the turn of the grub screws.
It's ingenious, and apparently proprietary to IM. I’ve never seen these pieces for sale.
Anyhow, when I hit the crater I snapped one of the lever arms off the splined collar allowing the collar to move freely in the torsion tube. This left me with a bottomed out suspension on the right rear side - broken with no replacement parts available (since IM is no more). Even if it is a third-party piece, it certainly wasn't available at the AutoZone near the Pisgah Forest Hampton Inn.
We had driven (not trailered) to the event, so I was dead in the water 700 mi from home.
Making the situation even more perfect was the fact that I'd promised Jeanie a side trip up to Washington DC after the TdS, and this was our ride.
^ There I am, hoping that if I stare at the broken piece long enough, maybe I could squeeze really hard and extrude a new piece. Actually, it’s a picture of me hoping the car will fall on my fat head and put me out of my misery.
Mike Fincher from Beck was at the event with a trailer, and after throwing myself on his mercy, @chines1 agreed to trailer the car back to Breman while I continued on to DC with Jeanie. We bummed a ride with @DannyP and Michelle to Roanoke, VA, where we rented a car and drove on to the nation's capital (no rentals available in Brevard or surrounds). We flew to Chicago from DC and rode the train back to central Illinois so it was a full-on Planes, Trains, and Automobiles experience.
Carey, Mike, and Danny saved my bacon, big-time and I can't thank them enough.
Back at Breman, Mike looked at the situation and gave me the option of trying to get the broken piece through some IM back-channel, or eliminating the torsion bars and shocks altogether and going to a coil-over arrangement with a torsion bar eliminator kit.
If I'm ever going to somehow fit a 5-speed back there, I'd need to do the coil-overs anyhow, so I elected to go the coil-over route. Mike did the work since he had the car and I was scheduled for new knees just after January 1. @Tom Boney and I picked up the car with my trailer in early December of last year. It drove well, tracked straight, and a normal man would have just left well enough alone.
Alas, I am what I am.
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My car had wide-5s and a circa-2005 CBP (aluminum hub) wide 5 kit. The front brake set on this kit is still in production, because it's a good set-up and works well. The rear brake set, however, has a fatal flaw. I believe that AirKewld simpy cuts splines in their aluminum hub on their wide-5 rear brakes, and it works just fine. When they were designing this hub, CBP was apparently concerned with the longevity of aluminum splines - so they set up their rear wide-5s with a steel spline center in an aluminum hub, which would be great if it were attached in some way.
Aluminum cannot be welded to steel, and they didn't want to bolt it for some reason (their new 4642 wide-5 brake set does just that), so they attempted to friction weld it. Friction welding is a process where one or both pieces move back and forth at a high rate, along the same principle as a buzzer. When the buzzing goes long enough, the boundary layer of both buzzing pieces melts a bit and is meant to fuse once the buzzing stops and the pieces cool. It's a neat process, but nowhere near strong enough to handle all the HP running through a rear hub. I spun the centers out of at least 3 rear hubs over the years, and I was exhibiting signs of doing it again.
The new brakes (pictured below) weren't available yet, and CSP and AirKewld rear brakes are pretty over-priced for what they are.
Additionally, my 195/65R15 Vredestein Sportraks had wrecked me. I'd never had summer tires on the car before, and I really never want to go back. The Vreds were lovely tires... which are NLA. Availability was always bad, and tire makers switch up the entire lineup every couple of years, apparently because they have ADHD.
Vredestein Sprint Classics are the only choice left in a sub-$200/tire, summer-compound, 15" tire, and unfortunately - they're oddball sizes. 185/70R15, 205/70R15, and 215/60R15 at TireRack.
I gave up and decided I to go to 16" wheels so I could get decent tires (more on the wheels in a bit). 16" performance tires are rare but not 15" rare, and I thought that since the cars originally came with 16" wheels, they might not look too stupid. A 195/55R16 is almost exactly the same height overall as a 195/65R15, so I decided to make the switch.
There are no 16" aluminum wide-5s available. I know 17" aluminum wide-5s are now for sale at CIP1, but weren't when I was making this decision (which is the story of my life).
This necessitated a complete conversion of the brakes from wide 5 to late Porsche drilled 5/130s. This is not the direction anybody goes on purpose, but I landed on a setup that met all my criteria. CBP makes a 5/130 brake kit with press-in lugs and aluminum front hubs. I haven't figured out what they're using for a rotor, but they're slotted and drilled. I didn't want to use the Ghia calipers that came with the kit (they weigh a ton) - and there is a guy on TheSamba (vDub Engineering) that makes an adapter plate to allow the use of Wilwood 4-piston DynaLite calipers with an EMPI 4-lug front disc (which uses Ghia calipers) and drum-brake spindles. I took a shot that they'd work with the CBP brakes, since they use the same caliper in stock form.
They worked. For some reason, the press-in 14 mm lugs are "steel wheel length", so I'm over $200 into new press-in Sway-a-Way lugs (I checked everywhere for alternative solutions - there weren't any). Connecting the brake-lines required some adapter fittings from Amazon, but the hybrid CBP rotor, vDub Engineering caliper brackets, and Wilwood DynaLite calipers all played nicely together.
…. and just like that, I had front brakes.
The rear kit uses a steel hub with a 914/6 brake rotor and the Ford Taurus SHO e-brake caliper everybody uses (including the CBP kit I already had). I reused my existing calipers and brackets because they were identical to the new parts. The rear brakes have a steel hub, and the rotors just slide over the lugs - but the entire thing needs to go together in a certain order to work. The track is a bit narrower than the old kit, which is good.
My caliper pins were frozen, and I spent several lovely early-summer hours freeing them up. I wanted decent pads for the rear brakes, so I got some Bosch semi-metallic pads from Rock Auto. They fit perfectly, except that the pads were a few mm too thick for the setup. The rear brakes dragged badly with the caliper piston fully compressed into the body. Rather than get bound up about how to shave some material, I decided I'd just "bed" the brakes by letting them drag until they moved freely.
With the steel hub, the brakes are a bit heavier than before, but the security of knowing they won't spin out is worth the extra 2 lbs per side.
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Which gets me to wheels and tires.
Fuchs are great. I don't have anything against them at all, but for whatever reason I never thought they'd look like jewelry on this car. Nevertheless, in December of last year, CIP1 was running one of their crazy wheel sales and they had 15x6" faux-Fuchs deep-6s polished for $130/wheel or some such - with shipping included. It seemed like too good a deal to pass up. I figured I'd soda-blast the wheels or something to butch them up a bit. I knew I wanted to run open centers and exposed black oxide lugs, and figured I could make them look right. They arrived, and they were beautiful:
... but just not the wheels for this car. Or maybe they are and I'm just an idiot. They're in 4 boxes in the garage, waiting for an epiphany.
I've been in love with the 16" Porsche 964/991 space-saver spares since I saw a picture of an Emory Outlaw with them many moons ago. The problem is, they're pretty rare. They didn't come on ALL '90s 911s, just some of them. Each car that did come with them only had one, and guys who buy 911s aren't in the habit of getting rid of stuff that might be worth something later. As a result - for a guy like me, chances were pretty poor that I'd come up with 4 decent ones.
I put @arajani on the hunt, and he quickly came up with the deal of the century on some polished 924 turbo spares (what @Marty Grzynkowicz had copied with his Coddington wheels), but they were 15", which didn't get me where I wanted to be. I like being stupid, so I passed.
Oddly, because this stuff never happens to me, I came across a current ad on the Pelican website. A guy in the Netherlands had 6 of these wheels, and the price was not too bad. I figured the shipping would be a killer, since I spent almost $600 to ship a set of heads to Denmark a couple of years ago - but the seller got a shipping quote of 400 euro, shipped to my door! The euro was almost at parity with the dollar around this time, so I PayPaled him the money and he shipped them off.
The wheels arrived on the last day of February (4 days after he sent them!), and all looked good.
The wheels came from the factory powdercoated red (as below). Every car I'd ever seen a picture of with these wheels has them powdered in a bright silver, which is really cool. However, one of the issues with having a silver car is that silver wheels have to be a pretty different silver, or they look like you were trying to match and missed. I've always been a fan of brushed aluminum (I had done it to my wide-5s), and I found a guy in Decatur, IL (an hour from my front door) who brushes and polishes metal for a living.
I took him all of the wheels just before the date of my first knee replacement in Chicago in early March. The guy (SureShine Polishing) attempted to remove the powdercoat with no success. They cannot be simply sandblasted, because that takes too much metal away. I drove back to Decatur and picked them up. I had located a company in Roselle, IL (up by Chicago) who does hot-dip stripping. They do wheels all the time, and seemed unphased by anything.
I was scheduled for my second knee replacement in early April, so I took all 6 wheels up to Chicago with me (my knees were done up there) and dropped them off at the hot-dip place the afternoon before my surgery.
When they were done, he UPSed them down to Decatur. As an aside - the shipping from one part of Illinois to another part of Illinois cost half as much as getting them from the Netherlands to my front door, and took exactly as long. Jason from SureShine picked the best 4 and went to work on them. He did a fabulous job and they were done in less than 2 weeks. They looked like this when done:
I took them straight from there to the powdercoat place, stressing many, many times that the wheels couldn't be touched or the fingerprints would get cleared into the finish. The guy was a bit freaked out. He didn't want to powder them (because I told him I didn't want the finish to yellow at all) he wanted to CeraKote them. I picked them up after 2 weeks, and found fingerprints under the clear on 2 of the wheels.
Normally I'd have obsessed over it, but I (rightly) surmised that once they were on the car with tires on them, nobody would ever be able to see the imperfections. I bought four 195/55/R16 Firehawk Firestone Indy 500 summer tires from TireRack. The tiresize is for a Mini Cooper S, so hopefully I'll be able to get tires going forward. Anyhow, the Firehawks have a treadwear rating of 340 and are summer-only directional tires. They're also "W" speed rated, which caused me to worry that the sidewall would be too stiff. They look the business on the car.
All that was left was brake fluid, and I went down a wormhole on this. Brake fade is caused by a lot of things, but one of them is boiling brake fluid. The holy grail is a fluid with a high boiling point that is not overly hygroscopic. Danny runs Motul DOT4 racing fluid, but he also religiously flushes his brakes every season. I don't, so I chose Motul DOT5.1 fluid, which is synthetic and has a really high boiling point (not as high as Danny's fluid), but is not as hygroscopic.
Once my 5 bottles of the fluid (which is priced like tears of a unicorn) arrived, I dropped the lift to add the fluid and found that when I pushed the calipers pistons all the way in on the rear brakes, I handily overflowed the reservoir and left the brake fluid to eat a bunch of truck-bed liner out of my trunk. I removed the reservoir, pulled the gas tank, cleaned off the loose liner, and resprayed the effected area with spray-bomb liner. It's not a perfect match, but it's a trunk.
After everything dried (OK, maybe just before everything dried) I reinstalled the reservoir and filled with my unicorn tears. I couldn't get anybody to help me bleed the brakes until we were watching some of the grandkids later in the weeks and I grabbed my 11 year old grandson to help.
I dropped the car and took it for a drive. It turned out I needed to get a different adapter fitting for the front brakes (straight, rather than right-angle), which meant losing more unicorn tears and bleeding the brakes again. I've got a good pedal and nothing rubs, but I'd like to rebleed later this summer.
I don't have a ton of pictures, but this is how it sits right now.
Ride height looks good, everything clears (although there's less room in the LR wheelwell than I would have thought), and I think it looks OK. I won't tear the centers out of the rear hubs and the brakes are really powerful.
While I was trying to do all of this, I got two knees replaced, went through 12 weeks of PT, tore a muscle in my right quadriceps, made a ton of progress on the project house across the street (siding is complete), built 150 ft of privacy fence with 6 gates, and ran a small business. I wish the 2234 was in the car, but this all got in the way.
I liked my car before and I like it now. Hopefully I'll keep liking it because there's plenty more to do as we move forward.
