bassIQ911: Back-seat drivers.

Wow. October. Hard to believe that I fixed the AC on this car back around Memorial Day, and haven't had an opportunity to post news of the fixer-upper-over-under-project since.

It hasn't been an entirely uneventful season: I did manage to complete all the small projects on my list - a few of which I will post here. And we did enjoy the beautiful weather by trekking out to Robert Moses Beach on occasion, and I did manage to log 6000+ miles on the 911, and occasionally go to work. Oh, yeah - and we moved. Citizens of Brooklyn we are no longer! So I have a good excuse for not updating the everyman porsche how-to blog.

What's more, we moved to bucolic Northern Westchester along the river. We now refer to Croton on Hudson as "home," and home it is: thousands of livable square feet, a swimming pool, endless amazing-to-drive roads, and... wait for it.... a garage! So my whole schtick around not having a proper work space, parking in the streets of NYC, and lugging my tools to and fro is now a moot point - a point that I am more than willing to let go.

Got some good projects out of the way though under those conditions, and without further adieu, lets get into it.

Rear "seat" 3-point seat-belts:

Kids. It's hard to live a selfish life once you start introducing new humans to the family, and I love my kids more than anything - more than life itself. ...let me retract that: I love my kids and my life with them - so let's all stay alive for a while, shall we?! 911's have a pretty bad (and undeniable) reputation for being hard to manage at the limit and therefore quite deadly... something about cantilevering all the weighty parts of a 2400 lb car with 200+ horsepower behind the rear axle makes them predictably unpredictable. Now, I'm not in the habit of taking turns at high speed with my 5 year old in tow, but I can appreciate the need to have him properly strapped in for expeditions of the grocery-getting and ice-cream-run variety. The lap belts that come stock on the car are about as bad as having no seat-belts, hell - they might be worse... so time to upgrade to some PEP Parts aftermarket 3-point seat-belts. Ya'know, for kids (I am linking to the product that worked in my application after many hours of online research and reading through multiple forums on the matter. Do your own research, and if you happen to read this and go strictly on my word, well - then it's on you if it doesn't work out).

In the 1982 SC, the rear parcel shelf and the perpendicular area behind the rear seat-back is a one piece combination of particle board/paper and some kind of compressed plastic hard core-foam, joined together somewhere around the right angle from seat-back to parcel shelf, wrapped in vinyl (or leather, or...). There are 4 screws holding it all in place, and a tab fitted to the particle board section behind the seats meets a metal loop on the car's firewall. I didn't see anywhere online what this tab was all about, so here it is (once you know what you're working with, it all becomes very easy - or at least easier):

TAB.

So as you can see, once you remove the 4 screws, it's an up-and-out motion to remove the whole thing, speakers and all (which I upgraded to a pair of Alpine 517's - sound great and fit perfectly. Matched to a blaupunkt under-seat 8" powered subwoofer, the system really pops, with just the right amount of, well, everything - and all in stock locations. OK, to be fair, the sub-woofer is under the driver's seat, but is not visible from outside or within the car. You would never suspect how nice the system is by looks alone).

Being that I really didn't know precisely where these things should mount up on the steel firewall, I decided to take a chance and positioned the cut-outs for the belts first, then mark the position on the rear metal deck after. It was the only way I could think of to get it in the right spot relative to each other. So using a found photo of aftermarket belts installed, I used a sharpie and the plastic grommit that came with the kit to sketch a guideline for my razor. Looked good to me - fairly straight and about in the right spot as I "a to b" compared the photo to my mark. I cut out the vinyl and the thin layer of subcutaneous foam, and proceeded to rout out the shape from the odd plastic material with a cutter bit on the Dremel. Oh - if you don't have a Dremel tool, stop reading right now and go buy one. Countless hours saved over many projects by the hand of this tool. Amazing.

rough, rough opening for seatbelt pass-through.

After a little clean up of the opening with the Dremel, I positioned the included plastic grommits. Took a little maneuvering to get the inner layer of foam to stay put, but once it was all worked and screwed into position, the assembly was pretty clean. For whatever reason, I opted to not take a pic from the visible side, so here's what it looked like from the important side, the side not visible from inside the car...

hole: ready!

Aha! Found a pic...

From here, I proceeded to snap the shelf/seatback assembly back into position in the car. I then poked a sharpie pen through the hole and marked the metal deck where it lines up. I removed the parcel shelf, positioned the belt reel behind my marks, outlined it with the sharpie, removed the reel and used my x-acto knife to cut away the sound deadening material from the metal deck/firewall. Looked something exactly like this:

It would appear that I jumped the gun a bit, as there is already a hole in position in this pic.

After much positioning and checking the underside of the firewall I marked the hole position and used a stepped-drill-bit to cut the 7/16" hole (I think that's how big it was... use the bolt as a reference so you get it right).

Here it is on the driver side. The base of the belt reel fitted perfectly against the metal ridge visible in the top left of the cut-out. This is how I determined where to position the exact location of the reel (it was too perfect!) and proceeded to drill the hole for the retaining bolt.

The belt kit came with large, 3" diameter washers to offer a little resistance to just pulling through the firewall in an accident. I also bought a separate set of dedicated bolts and washers and proceeded to double them up inside the engine bay. I would have to say that between the two large washers, the aggressive lock rings, and the torqued double nut arrangement, I am confident that this isn't going anywhere. Here's a slightly out of focus shot of threading the bolt and reel through my perfectly positioned hole (dumb luck came a bit into play here). And apologies for the questionable photos... I pride myself on taking the time to do a nice job with the photography, but being outside in the high-noon July sun through the large greenhouse back window, I put photography on the back burner (no pun intended) and focused (also no pun intended) on just getting it done.

I failed to snap pictures of mounting up the rest of the belt hardware (see note above regarding "cabin heat" and "sweltering summer sun"), but suffice it to say, it all fit well and lined up. I decided to trim about 30" from the seat-belt at the reel, and re-seated it with the reel's retaining pin as the amount of belt material was about 7 feet more than necessary. Being that the reel was over full, it would not recoil enough to keep the unused belt taught.

In the end, it proved to be a clean install, looks factory and is solid as all get-out. Now I can pop my boy in the back for ice-cream runs without any pangs of guilt, because I know he's solidly in there and will be safe, sharp turns not withstanding.

all aboard! next stop: Blue Pig Ice Cream!

Inner Door Latch Handle UPGRADE

Also this summer, I upgraded the inner door latches. This was a really easy job, and will probably take more time to type this then it did to do the job (I am a terrible typist. I do generation X proud.) I did snap a couple pics of the process though, and seeing the parts may prove to be very helpful for anyone else doing this upgrade.

The handles used to open the doors in these cars are flimsy. It's quite literally the weakest part on the car, and are suspiciously out of step with the rest of the build quality - almost certainly developed on a Friday (Gott sei Dank, es ist Freitag!)

The process is pretty simple, and I will just come right out and describe it here in a few easy steps:

Remove Map pocket from door. This provides easy access to existing handle hinge pin and spring clip.
Remove metal "L" connector from plastic seat on back of handle. Swing handle out to 90 degree angle from door, so you can get in there for step 3...
Remove top spring clip. See photo of removed clip below. Laying a large, light colored sheet under work area is highly recommended as these things tend to fly.
Slide hinge pin out of the bottom of, um, the hinge.
remove flimsy plastic handle
remove white plastic seat from old handle, and snap it into new, high quality aluminum handle you just received from Rennline.
reverse steps to re-install. Take your time inserting the clip as they are small and easily lost. Also, the hinge pin is a really tight fit into the new aluminum handle. Next to impossible to get in there, so grab your small round file and ream out the handle a bit.
open and close your door maniacally a few dozen times as you take in the solid, tactile feel that this has been missing for 35 years.