New Bellows, Seals and License Plate Lights

When I took the tail light lenses off to install the new LED exterior bulbs, I noticed that the rubber seals to keep water out was falling apart. I guess none of the previous owners in the past 37 years thought it might be a good idea to replace the rubber. I also noticed that in the passenger side tail light housing, the rubber drain tube was completely missing. I picked up some new seals to replace both sides as well as a new rubber drain tube and put them in.

Old word out tail light seals - 9-13-2020

Old seals removed

New drain tube

New tail light seal installed

While I was doing this, SJF was replacing all the bellows all around. There was nothing wrong with them cosmetically from the outside but at least two bellows had nuts that were seized so they couldn't be removed without destroying them to some extent. It took me almost 2 months to get replacements and I didn't want the body shop to have to struggle with this so I wanted to get this done ahead of time. I also wanted to ensure that the new bellows fit the way I wanted since I opted to get good quality reproduction ones rather than the original Porsche parts. Fitment was about 9.5/10 but good enough and for something that's just basically rubber non-structural pieces, it didn't make sense to go spend money extra on the originals.

Front bellow removed

New front bellow installed

When we replaced the rear bellows, I also bought better condition used bumper side panels. The original ones on the car looked pretty beat up and I wanted the body shop to start with a better panel when it goes in for repaint.

Rear side panel and bellow removed

New bellow and cleaner rear side panel trimmed for exhaust
clearance and installed

Right rear side panel and bellow installed

Finally, I needed a way to illuminate the rear license plate after removing the bumperettes. I bought two potential options. The first was a pair of black Hella license plate lights that would sit on either side of the plate. The second was an LED illuminated license plate frame. I opted to not use the Hella lights because they stuck out a bit too far. Since the car is driven day time 95% of the time, it didn't make much sense to have ugly black bumps stick out from the now clean bumper even when they weren't in use. The Radiantz LED license plate frame I got is nice and stealthy. When not in use it looks just like any normal black license plate frame but when I turn on my lights, it illuminates the plate from the top with just the right amount of light.

Radiantz LED license plate frame

Waterproof LEDs lining the top part of the frame

To install it, a small hole had to be drilled just behind the plate to allow the wiring to get through. Due to the placement of the wire, a notch in the license plate was also needed. The next part was to avoid getting the wire too hot from being in proximity to the muffler. SJF wrapped the wires in heat reflective tape and ran it above the bumper on the inside with metal zip ties.

New hole in the bumper to pass the wire through.

Wires wrapped in heat reflective tape and routed above the bumper
and connected to factory license plate light wiring.

License plate lights turned on. The color is white even though it
looks blue in the photo.

First Autocross for Scarlett - Throttle Problems

You can argue track versus autocross until you're blue in the face but the reality is that there's nothing like an autocross to safely explore the limits of your car. With so many direction changes in such a short time and a variety of surface conditions (undulations, bumps, etc), you can really put your car and your driving through its paces. Needless to say, I felt that the best way for me to understand how the 911SC feels at the limit and to make sure everything is good before going in for paint would be to take her to an autocross, and today was the perfect day for it.

NNJR SCCA Autocross - 9-6-2020

My main goal was to find out if I have any clearance issues. I had previously hit the fender pretty badly with my front right tire due to low ride height and I wasn't completely sure if the slight roll we did a few weeks ago would be enough. My second goal was to get a feel for the dynamics of the car under threshold braking and in quick transitions. On my first run, I took it a little easy, trying to pay attention to everything I was hearing and feeling in the car. Although the run was slow I was relieved to find no issues with tire clearance. I was also surprised at how fairly well balanced she was. It wasn't nearly as tail-happy under braking or when lifting throttle as I was expecting and the diff was working well to put the power down with the limiting factor being the tires.

NNJR SCCA Autocross - 9-6-2020

On my next run, I was feeling more confident to really attack the corners and was finding better pace but in the final 180 towards the finish, I suddenly lost all throttle. It didn't seem like an engine issue, just that the pedal wasn't doing anything. I figured a throttle linkage came loose and after getting back in grid, sure enough, the accelerator rod ball end had popped out of the pedal. Seemed like an easy enough fix to just pop it back in. On my next run it happened again after a bump. It seems that the socket on the plastic accelerator pedal had worn to the point of not being snug enough to hold the ball in under more extreme conditions.

Accelerator rod ball end disconnected from the pedal

Socket on the pedal is a bit loose

A quick search of the issue indicated that this is common and the accelerator pedal is considered a wear item on raced 911s and people replace it every other year...yikes! Considering this is the original pedal from 37 years ago, I guess it makes sense that it eventually failed. For street driving, this probably would've just stayed in there forever but when pushed harder, it simply wouldn't hold up. I've since purchased something to fix this correctly rather than just replace it with another pedal with the exact same design Achilles heel. It blows my mind that such an important part of the car just relies on the friction of a metal ball inside a plastic socket to hold it all together.

This issue aside, I was really enjoying driving her. On the upside, this issue is pretty minor and the car otherwise was working really well. I think I'm going to change out the torsion bars to improve rotation a little and reduce the body roll a little. She's certainly not as fast as my other cars but it felt quite rewarding to gain that confidence to push this car in the corners in the few runs I got before I called it quits.


Setup Notes:

Dampers: middle all around
Front pressures: 32psi
Rear pressures: 35psi

Fender Roll

Now that the GTi is on the softer KW Comfort Sport suspension, I noticed the front tires were rubbing slightly on the front fender. I had already previously lifted up the fender liner tab to clear the 245s on the 18x8.5 +45 wheels but this time I figured I might as well get the whole fender rolled to avoid any further issues.

Front fender rolling - 9-2-2020

I went to see Dan and got the fender rolled pretty quickly. This has definitely reduced the amount of rubbing but it still does on big dips in the road. I suspect between the softer valving and low ride height, I'm actually hitting the fender liner now. I may have to raise the car a little or stiffen the front dampers to avoid this.

Front fenders rolled nicely

Ah the joys of modified cars!

More LEDs, Gauge Overlays and other fiddly bits

Since I took the week off, I figured it'd be a good time to get on with the minor modifications I've been procrastinating on. First up was the 3.0 badge I had JimmyT on the Pelican boards make for me. I've been having a thing recently for low key badges that are only visible when you look really closely so I had it coated matte black to be mostly invisible. It'll probably have to be modified in the future since it doesn't sit flush but I wanted to install it before it got lost in the garage somewhere. It was designed to sit inside the slats of the OEM grille so it sits a little high but overall I like how it looks.

3.0 Badge

Next I removed the oil temp/pressure gauge so I could install new overlays that allow me to actually read out the oil temp in Fahrenheit and the pressure in PSI. Unfortunately, I got sent two temperature overlays instead so for now I only installed temperature one. It wasn't too bad but I took a ton of pictures to remember which wires go where since the entire gauge had to pulled out of the car. The overlay method is really nice because it literally just sits on top of the factory oil gauge face once you pull the mechanism out. The alternative is to get a backdate gauge but that also requires a new backdated oil temp sender to be installed. This is far easier and looks just as good. New Vintage USA makes 3 different temperature ranges based on how your stock gauge looks like. Since mine has a "big red" bar on top, I needed the "Style C" overlay face to ensure that the numbers are correct. 

Disconnecting the oi temp/pressure gauge

Stock gauge indicators are a bit vague

New Gauge Overlay from New Vintage USA

Just need to unscrew each gauge and screw the new face on

The engineer in me loves seeing numbers

Fascinatingly enough, now that I see the numbers, that means that in the summer with the AC on, idling in traffic, before I got my new oil cooler setup, I was seeing oil temps as high as 260F yikes. The final thing I wanted to get done today was changing out all the exterior bulbs to LED. Changing bulbs shouldn't really be difficult and frankly it isn't but for this car if you change the exterior turn signal bulbs to LEDs, you need to replace the gauge bulbs with LEDs, redo some wiring and put in a new flasher relay. The flasher relay was supposed to be the easy part especially since I already had the oil temp gauge out of the way but it's also accessible from the frunk. Unfortunately when I went to find it, it was missing.

Um...where's the flasher relay?

It was supposed to be where that little hole right in the middle of the picture above is. I turned my signals on and they were working and I could even hear the relay but I couldn't see it anywhere. Initially I thought that maybe in 83 they relocated it elsewhere so I spent the better part of an hour trying to find pictures. Everything I read said it was supposed to be right there. Finally after reaching behind all the wires and air ducting, I found it. I guess at some point, this relay was replaced but they pulled the little socket from the body and got lazy to re-attach it (to be fair I was lazy to do it too) and just tucked it in there out of the way.

Eureka...found the old relay and installed the one

Now I could proceed to replace the signal bulbs inside the gauge, disconnecting the blue/white signal wires replacing it with the new harness (blue wires).

New gauge turn signal bulbs

New signal bulb wiring harness installed

It was all downhill from there. I just had to go swap out all the exterior bulbs which were nicely labeled by Carmagic. I love how easy it is to swap the exterior bulbs. You just need to unscrew the lenses and they're right there.

New front bulbs

New LED front bulbs installed

New LED rear bulbs installed

New LED rear bulbs installed

I got the polarity right on all the bulbs except for one of the gauge signal bulbs but quickly flipping it over solved that. It was a worthwhile upgrade despite taking far longer than it should have. The lights are much brighter and use far less power. The reverse lights are so bright, it's like having headings on the back of your car.

So bright, so good

I can back up when it's pitch black out now

Overall that was a pretty productive morning. I didn't want to waste the whole day fiddling around with the cars in the garage so I spent a good part of the afternoon taking her out for a nice little drive which is always fun any day of the week. 

First Autocross in 2020

I can't believe that it's almost been a full year since the last time I autocrossed. Needless to say, I was pretty excited. Becca was there with her 350Z so it gave me some incentive to at least try to drive a little harder.

NNJR SCCA Autocross - 8-30-2020

My early runs were a mess. The car was understeering everywhere and my timing was so off I just kept hitting cones. I was able to clean up my runs but the car still wouldn't rotate easily. After softening the front compression and reducing rear rebound to let the rear work better, it finally started to feel better. I was still trailing a few hundredths of a second going into our final runs but the changes I'd made to the suspension allowed me to attack the course a little harder. I finally broke through and found a tenth of a second to take the lead.

STU Final Results

Looking at the video, it's a horrible mess. I had so much daylight between the car and the cones. The lines were mediocre at best and frankly, if Becca was fully prepped I would've been destroyed. Overall though I enjoyed the fun little battle we had and was just glad to be out there and see everyone again after so many months.

NNJR SCCA Autocross - 8-30-2020

Setup Notes:

Front:
Compression: 4
Rebound: 11
Pressure: 30psi

Rear:
Compression: 9
Rebound: 7
Pressure: 32psi

Perfectly Damped - KW Street Comfort

For months now I've been getting increasingly annoyed with the ride quality of the GTi. Regardless of DCC setting it was just too harsh over dips and bumps on the road. Since this is primarily my street car, I wanted the ride quality to be comfortable without sacrificing handling performance. After some research it seemed like the KW Street Comfort coilover setup would solve all these problems. I dropped the car off with Speedsport Tuning this past weekend so they could finish the install and alignment during the week.

KW Street Comfort Installed - 8-26-2020

It took about 2 months to get these made and delivered from Germany but it's really worth it. As with all the KW products, the quality is phenomenal. This setup effectively deletes DCC which is fine because frankly DCC doesn't really do much for this car on stock dampers anyway.

KW Street Comfort

KW Street Comfort

I've had Eibach Prokit springs on stock shocks for a few thousand miles now but the car has over 60K miles overall and the springs simply wore out the factory dampers. It's likely that these springs on a fresh set of dampers might have been manageable but they were clearly no good for the tired old ones. The installation went smoothly and I asked the shop to adjust the ride height to be about 1/4 inch higher over my old lowered ride height since it was a bit too low when going up steeper driveways. I also provided fresh bolts and nuts to replace all one-time use hardware.

Rear dampers and springs installed

Front dampers and springs installed

Suspension getting installed at SST

They adjusted the dampers to about 3/4 stiffness. The front adjusters are easy to get to but basically you can't adjust the rear dampers without either cutting a hole in the panels or removing them so I was hoping it wasn't set too stiff. Front camber was maxed out to -1.3 degrees and zero toe. Rear was set to -1 degree of camber and just a hair of toe in.

Just the right ride height

My first impression after driving it the 60 miles or so home is that these are absolutely perfect for my application. It drives exactly how you'd expect a Euro car to drive; firm but critically damped. It soaks up road imperfections without feeling floaty. Even manhole covers no longer make me cringe. Cornering feels excellent. Body roll is minimal and I'd say the ride quality is comparable to the KW Classics I have installed on the 911SC. I really believe this is how the car should've come out of the factory. Even though DCC is deleted so changing the setting from soft to sport doesn't actually change anything anymore, it's fine because it's basically optimal for both these conditions out of box. KW Suspension does it again and for a mixed duty car with primarily street duty, I'd give this an emphatic 10/10 rating. My only wish was that I had done this sooner. This GTi is now absolutely perfect for what I envisioned a hot hatch should be in terms of power, handling and practicality.

Big thanks to John Darley and the Euro techs at SST for the quick turnaround and making sure things were done exactly as I wanted.

Maintenance Update:

Mileage: 60,295
- New KW Street Comfort Suspension
- New Suspension bolts and nuts

Simplify and Add Lightness

Now that I'm pretty confident that all my mechanical and electrical issues are fully sorted, it was time to tackle some of the exterior modifications before she goes in for paint in the next month or two. It was a pretty good day to be doing this stuff with SJF Performance. Nice and cool with nasty rain outside made it ideal conditions to just spend the whole day in the garage. First up was deleting the pretty useless fog lights and installing the new club sport lower valence that deletes holes for the OEM foglights. There's nothing wrong per se with the stock SC foglights but I got rid of them for a few reasons. The first is that with LED headlights, I have more than enough illumination that the added foglights don't even register with my eyes when I turn them on. Secondly, unlike the 3.2 Carrera that followed, the foglights stick out on stalks that look like they're an afterthought rather than being tightly integrated into the lower valence.

Foglights deleted, new valence and lip installed - 8-16-2020

The first step was to unscrew the sides of the front black bumper bar cover, then you can just pull it out and try not to break any clips. 4 nuts hold the bumper to the front bumper shocks and then there's two nuts you have to get to from inside the frunk. 

Removing the front bumper

Next you have to remove the side bellows. There are 4 nuts that need to be removed, two holding it to the a little bumper trim and two to the front bumper itself. You only really need to remove the two in the rear going to the bumper trim and then the top nut going to the bumper itself which is in an annoying hard to get spot especially if you have big fender intercooler. SJF figured out it was easiest to get to it from the side if you pull the bellows out slightly. 

Removing the front bellows

With the bumper free from attachments you can start to pull on it forward and it should just come right off. Unfortunately the front signal lights are attached to the bumper so you'll need to detach them by undoing the nuts from behind the bumper and then passing them through the hole. Similarly,  we disconnected the headlight washer hose going to the nozzles.

Front bumper removed

Before we could remove the front valence, the front foglights had to be disconnected. Removing the front lenses allowed for the internal assembly to come out and the foglights disconnected. It was then a matter of slipping the wiring through the grommet for removal. We could then tape up the connectors and zip tie them out of the way just in case I ever want to put them back (yea right).

Foglight  housing

Internal foglight assembly removed

Foglight wiring zip tied out of the way

With the wiring cleared up, it was just a matter of removing the nuts and bolts holding the valence in place. The old OEM front splitter was attached to the lower valence so removing the valence also conveniently removes it as well. My original splitter was actually cracked already when I bought it so I was able to pick up another used one that was in better condition and that's what we connected to the new valance. Installation of the new valence was pretty much just the reverse. We did have to drill the holes on the sides that the splitter attaches to and I got new hardware for the splitter since I wasn't sure what the condition of the old hardware was. I also got a new license plate mount since I didn't want the slowly rusting old one to fall apart on me. I think the new valence with the fresher splitter and no foglights really tidies up the front quite nicely and removes some weight up there even though it's pretty negligible. 

Side profile of new valence

It looks pretty nice, even in black

After that was sorted and stuffing our face for lunch, we moved onto the rear. I had initially planned on replacing the original bumperettes with euro, slimmer style, bumperettes but after some contemplation I decided that removing them altogether would actually look best. We had to drop the muffler in order to get the 3 nuts holding each bumperette in place and because they'd been in place for 37 years, they needed some persuasion with a rubber mallet from the back to come off. 

Say good-bye to the "in your face" bumperettes

You also have to remove the license plate lights so the wiring can be disconnected before actually pulling the bumperettes off. The bumperettes weight in at a hefty 7 lbs each and considering they stick out all the way back there, they're adding weight in the wrong spot. They also add about 6 inches to length of the car unnecessarily. 

Bumperettes removed

I was pleased to see that the paint underneath was quite good but of course over the years some dirt and grime had found its way in there. We pulled the wire through and taped and zip tied them out of the way. After some cleaning, they looked half-way decent but with the obvious holes still in place. These holes are going to be welded shut before the car gets painted over so they'll be nice and smooth in the end.

Rear bumper cleaned a bit

SJF had the bright idea of using some red vinyl he had for decals that was surprisingly a good match for Guards Red and Jenna cut some small pieces to cover the holes. You can see them in real life but as you can see, they're almost invisible in photos or from a distance.

Red vinyl covering the holes

Finally, it was time to remove the stock plastic deck lid grille and install the perforated aluminum one from X-Faktory. This should be a simple job but since the car has AC, the condenser is in the way of all the nuts that needed to be removed. Still, after some patience and the three of us doing our part, we got the grille in and transferred the Luftgekuhlt emblem I had on the factory grille over. I think this grille is a simple detail that adds a touch of low key aggression and actually weighs less than the factory pieces (about half the weight). 

Factory plastic grille

New black X-Faktory perforated aluminum grille installed

New black X-Faktory perforated aluminum grille installed

This pretty much completes the external mods to the car. I have to think about how I'm going to do the rear license plate lights but frankly I don't really drive the car at night so it's really not that big of a deal. I'm super excited to get the car off to get painted later this year. I'm still waiting on replacement front and rear bellows since a few of the studs in my original ones are a bit screwed up and don't allow the nut to come on or off properly. I might also get new front and rear bumper strips since it probably makes sense to put in some fresh ones after the car gets painted. Overall, I'm really happy with how she's turned out. It's just the right amount of restomod without going full on outlaw and while I'm certainly going to get snubbed by purists, I think real Porsche enthusiasts can appreciate what's been done to breath new and exciting life back into this 83 SC.