Car appreciation... the aesthetics, the engineering, etc

Starting work on the brat this weekend. First job is to thoroughly jetwash the underside, get the car up on stands and build a tent over it. Have been given a corner of my parents garden to do this in. Hopefully get everything stripped, and start prepping for some welding, and designing and fabricating the epoxy/ fibreglass front bumper. Also need to straighten out the creased bonnet, so I'm going to take the opportunity to add these vents, from an Aston Martin dbs. Going to position them to help flow over the heads for planned twin weber idf upgrade (some day in the future, when I have more time and money).

2 Attachments

My brother is considering buying this: https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/2019199028106603

1500 quid.

I only have 1 experience to pass on. When my mate moved to LA he bought an A8. It cost him $500/month on average in repair and maintenance bills.

I personally would avoid.

I mean that's the logical reason it's being sold......but v8.

200k?

That's a lot of miles in the UK imo.

I'm looking forward to the updates!

Having had my alloys refurbished, I need some new wheel bolts (oem are rusty).

What's the deal with wheel bolts, where can I find some decent ones. BMW wanted £100 for 20.

Other option is to clean up and hammerite the oem ones.

That's pretty reasonable, I'd get them.

Brrm brrm:

To be fair, I can buy some paint for £5. I'll be doing that first..

Don’t get any on the face of the body that holds the wheel onto the hub- last time I went to a track day they lectured us all on the perils of paint and wheel bolts (this was spring, a lot of the cars there had been freshly painted/just come from winter fettling) as the paint melts/softens with heat from the brakes and what was a bolt done up to 130Nm at the start of the session isn’t by the end.

I changed all the wheelbolts on the 850 just before handing the keys to NH as they’d got a bit rusty and looked shit, went for Volvo OEM which was the same price as BMW have quoted you.

Thanks. Seen the tip of popping them into cardboard, then you can't paint the thread.

Would just rather put any cash I have towards remap, before tarting.

Dammit's talking about the tapers rather than the thread I think. Makes sense, make sure you mask everything not visible from the outside.

Spot on. Went through all connections near where I'd worked with a wire brush and some battery grease. Changed the battery for good measure. Started right up. Still sounds like shit, but a new belt, bearing and power steering pump should sort that.

Ah yes thanks for pointing that out.

Dammit's talking about the tapers rather than the thread I think. Makes sense, make sure you mask everything not visible from the outside.

Correct - also make sure you have the correct type of taper, when I was up at Centre Gravity they buzzed the wheel bolts out of a very expensive set of Fuchs' on a 997 that had just turned up, to see that they were all conical. Porsche wheels use hemispherical mounting surfaces, so with the conical bolts only a tiny area was actually in contact.

That chap had the local Porsche centre deliver 20 new wheel-bolts that day, with the conical ones all going straight in the bin.

Awesome!

I assert that these headlight covers are stupid:

Talking of wheel bolts has your 911 got the little black caps over all of them? My Boxster did and I thought that was a nice way of keeping them looking good.

The Aston has titanium ones.

No, I just have the standard bolts - plebian stainless steel.

I concur

Seats: I had a chat (finally!) with the trimmers, the goal being to establish that a) they had the complete list of things to do and b) when might they be finished?

The chap did say that whilst they were going to do their best to get the seating position lower in the car there was a limit to what they could achieve without making the seat very uncomfortable.

i.e. they can't make the seat base foam too thin.

Now, hopefully they'll find that they can, but if they can't - I'd guess that the only option is different seats?

Operating on that assumption, and that I'd like the car to look as if it had been built by Porsche, I'd guess my only option would be the Recaro buckets - and they're a) NLA and b) spendy.

So! Have I missed something?

These are the GT3 buckets, although actually my car predates the GT3, so these wouldn't actually have existed when it was built - or not to order anyway:

These would have been available to buy when the car was ordered - 993 Recaro: