by John Glynn | Nov 13, 2016 | Classic Porsche Blog, Modified Porsche Hot Rods
I’ve been a bit of an air-cooled 911 accessories shopping guide of late! My friends at KW Suspension in Germany have just released a new suspension kit (and reminded me of an older one) for impact-bumper Porsche 911 models and I promised I would share.
The first kit is an adjustable damper upgrade for G-model 911s which works with the torsion bar system. Part of the KW Suspension “Classic Range”, this KW Variant 3 setup is a complete car set of compression and rebound adjustable shock absorbers. The kit does not require a conversion to coilovers, but instead retains the car’s torsion bar system. The mild steel damper bodies are galvanised for longer life.
KW Suspension Coilovers for Torsion Bar Delete
Further up the price scale is the Clubsport 2-way coilover kit, which allows torsion bar deletion. KW recommends this lighter system with aluminium damper bodies primarily for motorsport use, but check your competition regs carefully before committing to the spend. Supplied with adjustable aluminium monoball front top mounts, the upside-down front dampers are adjustable for both rebound and compression.
Rebound is adjusted at the piston rod end and provides sixteen clicks of adjustment. Compression adjustment is carried out via a 12-position adjuster on the upper damper housing. “Increased rebound forces ensure tighter handling and a significantly reduced rolling of the body,” say KW. “At very high speeds, the steering precision is improved at the driving dynamic limit, while on the uneven and wavy road surfaces, a lower rebound stage is advantageous.”
Both kits are TUV approved for use on the roads. The Variant 3 kit costs £2062 plus VAT in the UK and is available from KW dealers. No price on the 2-ways: I expect you might need to be sitting down for that one 😀
by John Glynn | Nov 11, 2016 | Classic Porsche Blog, Porsche News
My friend Guy Allen has released a new Porsche print. An atmospheric rendition of the SWB car in flight, it’s another great example of why Guy is one of the UK’s busiest illustrators.
Guy’s previous Porsche work is all over Ferdinand. I’ve commissioned him a few times for impactbumpers t-shirt artwork and we’ve also released prints of this work together. Those prints all sold out long ago, and I would not be surprised to see this one sell out just as quickly.
The SWB 911 has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years. Once ignored as the runt of the litter due to the twitchy handling and smaller engines, contemporary Porsche fans now rightly regard its Germanic purity and unique driving experience as a pivotal step in Porsche history. The SWB cars were the original lightweights and the thread of their lineage must be carefully picked through the model lines – some 911s follow the founding philosophy much closer than others.
My first proper experience of a SWB car came while I still lived in Ireland. A friend’s dad was a keen rally driver and also owned a garage. He had a SWB car in for some work and I would see that driving around quite a bit. It was LHD and may even have been something famous once upon a time, but I never got close enough for a proper look. Years later, when Jamie and I shot a well-known piece featuring two SWB 911s on our first trip to California (Short but Sweet: read it here), I remembered that early rally car and thought how well it would have slotted in with Bob Tilton and Chris Nielsen’s rally inspired R Gruppe machines. I should have bought a SWB project car then, but I missed that particular boat – they are now well out of my reach.
Experience the SWB cars in depth and you gain a unique understanding of the original 911 ethos, but race a SWB car hard and win with it, and you enter another dimension of 911 folklore. The UK saw a huge jump in SWB enthusiasm when the 73rd Goodwood Members’ Meeting featured the Aldington Trophy: a race for pre-’66 SWB 911s only. Mark Bates raced the EB Motorsport SWB 911 at Goodwood among a select group of its peers and spent most of the lap going sideways in some very close battles. Mark finished on the podium after a great hour of racing and people still talk to me about that mental race – a fine day in the SWB story.
Away from the circuits, SWB 911s make highly prized road cars, but finding original interior parts and trim is now perhaps the hardest part of a SWB restoration. There is plenty of choice as to who restores your SWB car but, with waiting lists as long as they are at the very best workshops, it might be quicker to learn the skills to restore it yourself! Plenty of Porsche fans are doing just that and, as a DIY diehard, I think that is brilliant.
Guy’s SWB Porsche print is produced on archive quality heavyweight paper. It is a limited edition of 200 large-format A2-sized prints (A2 is 420 x 594 mm). The prints are signed and numbered and you can take a closer look at them here.
by John Glynn | Nov 4, 2016 | Classic Porsche Blog, Art and Books
As classic Porsches assume the air of treasured possessions such as fine art or jewellery, so more artful representations of the cars arrive on the market to remind us of our passion. Many artists have produced representations of the classic Porsche 911 and 356 models, but these recent sculptures from Rotterdam artist, Stefan de Beer, really caught my eye.
The former car restorer and trained artist has created his Porsche studies with long-time creative partner, Brigitte Broer. The shapes speak for themselves, but I really love the concept of louvred sections, which call to mind the cooling fins on an air-cooled Porsche engine.
“After a successful career as a racecar designer, I returned to my early love for art and architecture,” says Stefan. “Long ago I started my education at the Academy of the Arts, after a few years I switched to car design at TU Delft, the Polytechnisch Bureau Arnhem and the Art Center College of Design in Switzerland. After twelve years as a car designer and engineer, I sold my business and returned to the Academy to start all over again and study art and architecture. Since 2007, I have found a perfect balance between art, architecture and old sportscars.”
Each of Stefan’s sculptures begins with 3D laser scan of a full-size car. CAD techology then is employed to generate a digital representation, at which point the artist select his sections, and transfers those dimensions to a pattern-making machine.
The laser pattern cutter transfers the profiles to high quality acrylic and wood materials for just the right effect. Each sculpture is then assembled by hand. The shapes can also be fitted with a lighting attachment, and even engraved with custom registration plates. The last bit might be a step too far for me – less is more, after all. Every piece comes with a ‘Certificate of Authenticity’, bearing the unique number of the sculpture and the signatures of the makers.
We’ve seen lots of other louvres on classic Porsches this year but none have felt as fresh and airy as these. Order direct from the partnership here.
by John Glynn | Sep 21, 2016 | Classic Porsche Blog, Porsche News
Ferdinand Porsche’s second postwar visit to the USA was in August 1952. The trip was arranged by Max Hoffman, who had visited Austria for a summer vacation and brought news of a possible consultancy opportunity with Studebaker. This gave the Porsche chief a very good reason to travel.
To discuss the Studebaker project and to catch up with what else was going on across the Atlantic, Ferry, Dodo (his wife) and engineer Karl Rabe (pic, left) sailed to America on board the Queen Elizabeth from Cherbourg to New York. The following passage is from “We at Porsche”: Ferry’s autobiography, which was written with the help of John Bentley.
“I went on to Detroit and called on an old friend, Zora Arkus-Duntov, who had transformed the original lifeless Chevrolet Corvette into a world-famous sports car – in fact the only true machine of this type built in the United States. He took me to the Research Centre of General Motors where I met Bill Mitchell, the chief of styling. We talked about new cars and walked through his office where he had some models. He pointed to a particular one and held it up. Here was a typical example of the communications problem between styling and engineering.
“”To get a nice looking front end on this car,” Mitchell said, “the engine must be lowered. I therefore modified the carburetion system to bring it lower and made other changes in the engine.”
“Arkus-Duntov, who was standing beside me, did not react favourably. “What nonsense,” he said. “There is no way to build such an engine.”
“This was all I needed to realise how far apart a stylist was from an engineer. If it was necessary to bring these two minds together, a third person would be needed who had a clear idea of what could and could not be done by both parties. Such an individual need not be either the best stylist or the best engineer, but he must know exactly how to bring about the most effective compromise.”
Given the unique look of the 356 and the first 911s ahead, Ferry’s opinion on the need for compromise between styling and engineering is interesting. One could say that this was the key skill of Erwin Komenda (pic, centre), who brought such life to the early Porsche products. A talented engineer and a great visual artist, Komenda was perhaps the ultimate agent of positive compromise.
The original meaning of ‘compromise’ suggests a joint agreement, from the Latin ‘com’ (together) and ‘promittere’ (promise). The word has taken on a negative aspect in recent times, as in “compromised security”, which is just a soft PR way of saying broken, failed or ineffective. This sense of compromise is not how Porsche would have viewed it, but some of the compromises made on later models could be regarded as counterproductive. There is seldom an upside in compromised principles to reach shallow goals.
However styling and engineering were balanced, durability was never negotiable. Reliability was Ferry’s first priority in all things Porsche. Herr Doctor would sacrifice anything else to ensure Porsches were reliable, as no Porsche should ever be seen broken down. He would not have handled a flat tyre in a car with no spare wheel very well.
by John Glynn | Jul 16, 2016 | Porsche Cayenne, Project Cars
Shakespeare once wrote that “the course of true love never did run smooth”. The timeless wisdom of this observation was proven yet again today, when I tackled a Porsche Cayenne rear spring replacement on my 2004 V8 Cayenne S: a.k.a. The Big Pig.
I took the Cayenne for MOT (annual safety inspection) last week and it was en route to passing with flying colours, until we got to the back end, where one spring had a cracked coil. Instant fail. I priced up genuine Porsche springs at £200 each plus the VAT, or Kilen springs made in Sweden from an eBay seller (the worryingly named “Octane Motorstore”) at £65 delivered for a pair. I wanted to change the pair of rear springs, so £400 versus £65 was a no brainer.
The Cayenne has now clocked up 159,000 miles, with 42k of those in my ownership. Despite all the grief that this high maintenance German car has caused compared to my six previous trouble-free Subaru Legacy station wagons, I’m still quite keen on it, so I do like to keep it working properly and do as much of the work as I can myself.
Rear spring repacement is a pretty easy job on these: the hardest part is finding the time and a dry day to do the work, and jacking the Cayenne up to get underneath it. Working on this thing on the ground is a pain in the arse as it is so heavy. I go with a belt and braces approach to supporting the car as I am always working on my own. You are not coming out in one normal-size piece if it slips off a jackstand while you’re underneath it, so I use substantial (heavy) underpinnings.
Eventually I got it up in the air, well supported with the rear wheels off and sized up the job. The rear suspension looks complicated, but it’s pretty simple: Pelican Parts has a great how-to on removing the rear suspension. The spring and damper assembly is a complete strut just like the front, so, once the anti-roll bar droplink is out of the way and the bottom shock nut is off, you just undo the four bolts holding the top mount to the chassis and drop the whole thing out. Then it’s easy enough to get spring compressors on the strut and break it all down into component pieces.
Everything went smoothly enough. Undoing the strut top bolts was a mother of a job but, with a mishmash of extensions and breaker bars, they all eventually came undone. Taking it apart was easy (another win for air tools), but of course my doubts about the eBay springs were well founded: completely the wrong size and shape. They’ve got to go back and the dubious seller is being pretty tight about paying for the return, even though they sent the wrong parts. I had a strong feeling that it was all too good to be true.
There are very few affordable options for uprated damper & spring kits on Cayennes, so to give myself more time to research what is out there and get the car back on the road in the meantime, I ordered a low mileage used rear strut assembly from a breaker friend of mine and will put that on to get the Cayenne through the MOT.
While I have the thing up in the air, I pulled the rear bumper, relocated the LPG filling point on to the chassis, jet washed everything and sprayed it all with some rustproofing wax.
