Got this recently from someone in my local club and thought it was pertinent to all of us, too. The "Rainer" talked about is Rainer Cooney, one of the pre-emminent 356 mechanics in New England.......He drives an original Speedster with a few hundred thousand miles on it....
"If you have attended one (or more than one) of Rainer's Customer Appreciation (Tech) events, you will recall that one of his "must do's", to avoid being left by the side of the road, is to replace your fan belt every year. Actually, you replace the one in the travel kit each year and use the one in the travel kit to replace the one on the engine.
The attached picture was sent to me by a good friend in Colorado. On Sunday he attended the Arapahoe Community College Concours, which is a big event for the Denver area. There were more than 400 cars on display and the theme car was Porsche. Anyway, as he preceded home on the I 25, accelerating in the left hand lane, he experienced a sudden loss of power. Needless to say in was hairy trying to get to the right side of the road across several lanes of traffic with a non-functioning engine. When he finally got stopped, safely, he found that the belt had not only taken out itself, it had also destroyed the wiring between the distributor and the coil. How many of us carry spare wire and spare terminal ends to attach the wire to whatever needs to be re-connected?
I have regularly reported the substance of Rainer's advice after each Tech session I've attended there, and my friend was quick to admit that, like a lot of us, while he knew and agreed with it, he just had not gotten around to implementing the annual fan belt change over. A good lesson learned for all of us.
And he thanks Rainer for the advice, even though he didn't follow it this time. He vows that it won't happen again."
