Porsche 924

[inconsistant]

Thats proper poverty spec too, no headlight washers or passenger door mirror, almost all Uk ones had both of these as std. 

[dome]

17 minutes ago, grogee said:

Here is my semi-employer's 924 asleep in its bubble. It's an early LHD one with 8000 miles (or km, I can't remember) on the clock. AFAIK he never drives it, which is a shame, although he has other Porsches (with engines at the wrong end) to drive. 

Wooft, what a honey! I'd love to try an early 924. My square dash 944s were some of the best handling cars I've driven so the purity of one of these really appeals

[Poweredbyhopealone]

16 hours ago, inconsistant said:

Oh wow thats close! What chod are you rocking so I can keep an eye out? The Warlingham classic car show in July is usually worth a visit. I also pop to the Black Swan Oakham breakfast meet from time to time, next to J10 A3/M25 so only 20mins up the road. 
 

It’s been a long time since there was an Autoshite Kent/Surrey/SE London SMOL meet. Maybe we should organise one?

At the moment a rusty MK4 Fiesta but soon I will be back in my dark blue E36 Cabrio. I went to the Warlingham show last year actually and was pretty impressed with the variety, even if the parking chap didn't consider my car worthy, but a rocket bunny E46 was! Do let me know when you're next heading to the Black Swan as I have heard of it but never made it down.

[inconsistant]

I think two and a half years is plenty long enough between updates! Now where were we? Ah yes, March 2022 and just passed MOT. Here it is back in spring 2022 nestled amongst the fleet:

 

March 2022

The sunroof seal I fitted in summer 2021 (see previous page) didn’t settle down to make the sunroof sit flush with the roof, and the flocking kept falling off so I finally contacted the supplier, Frazerpart, about it, He is mega helpful and brilliant at finding and supplying quality 924 parts. It turns out he was supplied the wrong seals or they were mis described to him or something so the seal wasn’t actually OEM. He gave me an immediate full refund and said keep the seal and he’d let me know when the OEM seals come in. Shout out to Max @ Frazerpart!

 

Visited Ace Cafe for a 924 owners club annual get together. Usual March meeting. Only a few of us turned up. I'm not sure the Ace Cafe is at its greatest. For me it's an hour's drive around the M25 in an old car when there are plenty of better cafe's closer by and a much more interesting drive to get to. Might be the last Ace visit for a while.

 

The interior light in the side of the boot keeps falling out of the hole in the carpet, I think the plastic tabs are broken. Will keep a look out for one or maybe some sort of bodge to keep it held in. Or maybe just ignore it.

In an exciting overlap of Porsche 924 ownership and Mini Cooper S ownership, my chum Alex (keep trying to get him on here, he’s got a mk1 Corsa td van (Combi, Combo or something like that?) that he’s mildly modified and uprated, he's got a late 50’s Lotus 7, he's got a two tone red and white 924 turbo he found sitting unloved on a driveway locally, bought and has brought back to life, and a couple of old motorbikes I can’t remember anything about.

In early 2022 he finally got a lovely paint job on the 924 turbo so we concocted an idea to get it featured in the 924oc magazine. We’d realised his 924 turbo and our Mini Cooper S were the same power, 170bhp, but other than that they were very different from each other in almost every way: one was twice the age of the other,  one supercharged the other turbo charged, front vs rear wheel drive, etc. I had never been in a 924 turbo and he’d never been in a ‘new’ Mini Cooper S. so we decided to do a comparison test between them, where we would be passenger in each other’s car and compare them.further details should probably go in my Mini thread but I’ll add couple of photos here…

 

 

[loserone]

4 minutes ago, inconsistant said:

updates

Name checks out.

 

 

[inconsistant]

April 2022

My brakes were binding. From the experience before I decided to have a go at cleaning up and greasing the sliders which seemed to do the job. Still not confident in bleeding brakes so I got a chum to help me with that. And by ‘help me’ obvs I mean he did it and I watched.

I had stuck nipples so ended up buying a cheap heat gun to convince it to come off. OMG why did I not buy one of these ages ago. Makes such easy work of stuck fixings.

[inconsistant]

May 2022

The blower motor stopped working. I did a quick check of the fuse, and checked to see if current was getting to the motor, and all seemed OK so it would seem the motor has packed in.

The development of the 924 from launch in 1975 to its replacement by the 924S in 1985 is an odd one. Early cars look almost identical to late ones, but they are massively different under the skin. Same engines but so much trim, components and fixtures and fittings were upgraded and replaced, For example the early ones had 4 speed gearbox, vinyl rear seats, completely different switchgear, gear nob, wing mirrors, etc etc and early ones were only galvanised up to about the door handles, later ones the whole body shell was done.. I’m guessing these refinements were gradually introduced as a rolling improvement programme in response to initial poor reviews on launch about the refinement, smoothness and general feel of the 924. The late ones feel very different to be in compared to the early ones. So there’s a cut off point about 1979 where lots of changes were made under the skin. Then other smaller changes came in each year up to about 1982-3 when they sort of gave up because everyone wanted the 944 and not a 924 so attention when on that.

Great. But why am I writing all this here? Because there is a cut off about 1980-81 where the blower motor was changed. My white 924, a 1985 model had the later blower motor. These are readily available as they were used in other VW models. They unplug, lift out from under the bonnet just below the windscreen and a swap takes about 15 mins, 12 mins of that is re-sealing the cover with sealant. These motors are about £25.

Obviously mine is an early one, they're like gold dust, and when available are about £160, It sits in almost exactly the same position as the later ones, but access to mine is from inside the car once  the whole dash is removed to gain access. Great.

 

 

 

I decided I would spend a bit of time seeing if there was another reason why out might have stopped working, and use it as a chance to try to understand a bit about how the blower motor works.  I can see the motor from under the bonnet, so I gave it several lubes over a few days to see if I could tempt it to spin.

 

 

From inside I took the control panel off (carefully, because it turns out that plastic trim panel is about £60-70 to replace secondhand off eBay. With the wiper arm inside the console cleaned and lubed, all the control cables checked and lubed and the motor lubed it made absolutely no difference.

 

 

 

So I ordered the cheapest motor I could find (£120) and decided I was going to have to engage in some major dash dismantling.

 

And then, a few weeks later, while I was waiting for the blower motor to arrive I had a chance conversation with another 924 owner who said there is a known bodge where you can refit the older blower motor from under the bonnet but you have to cut the plastic blower motor supports off, swap motors, then glue back into position with araldite. That's the 6 black fins in the photos above that suspend the motor and fan. Sounded dodgy but crucially with the blower motor cover and shroud back on you can’t see the supports.

I decided very quickly this was what I was going to do.

[Volksy]

I'm pretty sure the boot lamp is also used by a lot of old VAG stuff. 

[inconsistant]

22 minutes ago, Volksy said:

I'm pretty sure the boot lamp is also used by a lot of old VAG stuff. 

I still haven't sorted this! Here's some more photos of mine:

 

It's been suggested that this is the one I need so I think you might be right:

https://www.heritagepartscentre.com/uk/823947105bgen-interior-light.html?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwoJa2BhBPEiwA0l0ImESOPdlFSsA1QVaT3RTYwj2bkXgJFF0XumDAjDd1egH2pJX3ymYebhoCi-AQAvD_BwE

 

[Volksy]

Yeh, seems to be a pretty standard Hella unit:

 

HELLA 2JA 002 931-031 Interior Light - 12V - K (10W) - Fitting - Lens Colour: Crystal clear - Interior : Amazon.co.uk: Automotive

[inconsistant]

July 2022

Blower motor arrived, and it was broken so got sent back

So instead of fixing it I took the 924 to a couple of car meets, first a brilliant monthly pub breakfast meet at  the Black Swan near J10 M25/A3:

 

And our local Classic Car Show

 

[inconsistant]

November 2022

I lost my rented garage but a friend of the family offered a space in theirs which was great. Not as convenient as it’s out in the sticks about 8 miles away, but at least it means the car is tucked away from the weather and out of harm’s way. Because the blower motor was broken it didn’t get used over the winter as it’s kind of hard to drive while freezing cold and unable to see out of the windscreen because of the condensation. So it stayed in the garage in hibernation for a couple of months while my attention turned to the tatty but interesting Audi A2 bought off of Sir Chocolate Teapot

This photo surfaced from a previous owner who owned the 924 about 10 years ago and had a bit of a thing for gold wheels. I definitely prefer the current wheels. 

[inconsistant]

Jan 2023

924 & A2 are united for the first time, and I’m pleased to say they got on really well. Two very different cars that came out of the same ex NSU factory in Neckarsulm 21 years apart.

 

Unfortunately someone else got on really well with the 924 over the winter. When I opened the boot it looked a bit more messy than I remember leaving it. As I looked closer I discovered more mess and a distinct smell of piss, and realised the 924 had  provided winter shelter for a mouse/some mice. It/they had pissed all over my interior, chewed my gloves, left teeny tiny pellets of mouse shit everywhere, chewed my collection of rags and receipts, chewed some of the sound deadening behind the carpet in the boot, chewed an interior light cable and gnawed at the seat fabric in the corner of the back seat. So not altogether good news.

And while clearing all this mess out of the boot I discovered about a thousand acorns stashed in amongst the chewed up blanket in one of the side bins in the boot. Tiny fuckers.

 

With the car cleaned up and all traces of mouse hoovered and antiseptic sprayed away (oh what a fun day that was, I even took the front seats out to get at all the wiffles and waffles) my attention turned to the blower motor. A 924 owning chum had a spare whole blower motor unit from  a car he was scrapping, so I took it off  him for nothing in the hope the motor might be good. It also gave me a chance to see what it looked like out of the car so I could make a plan for extracting my motor out of the top . I did a dummy run with this one, cutting the supports carefully with a hack saw, and pulled the motor out for a look.

Unfortunately this one was also seized solid. Doh. I used some gt40, plusgas and a cordless drill on it to try to get some movement . I left it running for ages and managed to wire it up to 12v power and got some rotation but it wasn’t spinning freely and there was definitely some resistance so I decided I wasn’t going to fit this one only to find it seized again and I’d have to do the job twice.

[inconsistant]

February 2023

Gave it a clean, took some photos, put it in for its (no longer required but still doing them anyway) MOT thinking it might fail on blower motor not working but it passed.  Hurrah!

 

 

It didn't stay looking lovely for long, as the fucking mouse came back and did shits and wizzles everywhere, and the rodenty bastard also chewed the rear seat fabric on the other side. Another afternoon of de mousing the interior to get rid of the stinks and stanks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally got it looking nice. Wondering if having it in a garage is actually helping. At least I'm getting good at removing and replacing the front seats.

 

2023 fleet photo

[inconsistant]

Also February 2023

Since it was looking nice and I'd spent lots of time cleaning it inside and out I thought I'd take it to a local posh classic car meet run by someone I know. There was some nice stuff there, and complimentary coffee and croissants. 

[inconsistant]

March 2023

I organised a breakfast meet  for local 924 owners;  breakfast in a pub followed by a visit to the Gatwick Museum of Aviation. Awesome museum, highly recommended!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[inconsistant]

Also March 2023

In an event organising frame of mind, and because there hadn’t been an Autoshite South Eastern Shitters meet up for years,  I got a few of us SE Shitters together on a cold drizzly March morning at Flower Farm in Godstone.

It was brilliant. The Audi A2 was being a bit of a naughty and at this point the 924 was my reliable transport so I took that, only to find another Shitter had brought along their black A2. Great to see another one close up and swap ownership experiences, and see the looks of bafflement on Shitters faces when they tried to work out how come it was actually bigger on the inside than the outside.. Also massive scotch eggs. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[inconsistant]

May 2023

I went to get the car from the garage. The mouse had returned, so after another clean up I went around the underside of the car with a torch looking for all possible tiny drainage hole entry points that an acorn would fit through and sealed them up with a bolt & penny washers either side. The only possible entry point I could see that I couldn’t seal up was the blower motor entrance hole because the shroud is clipped on but not sealed waiting for the blower motor to be replaced before sealing again, this has  a gap that goes into the footwell. Because I'm using the car every couple of weeks the mouse/mice are only coming in and leaving tiny turds everywhere, they don't get the chance to properly bed in and make themselves comfortable.

There. Try getting in now you destructive little buggers.

 

Also, one of the back tyres was flat so I swapped the spare on, and when I got back home I pumped the flat one up and it stayed up over night so I put it back on the car. That was a mistake as I then had to swap it back again by the roadside as it had gone flat within 30 mins of driving. New tyre purchased and fitted.

 

I ordered a set of new floor mats as the other ones were the wrong sort of beige (see first pic in this post). Too grey and not yellowy enough to match the carpets and seats. Also I decided beige wasn't very practical anyway so went with some very dark brown ones. Not a great match for the brown of the dashboard but I think they'll do.

 

I organised another 924 breakfast meet, something a little closer than the Ace Cafe that didn't involve sitting on the busiest section of the M25 in an old car for an hour. I found a  brilliant American Diner near Horsham called Max’s Diner, a tiny converted chapel.

 

 

I’d ordered a blower motor from the Porsche dealership in Sidcup (as noted before they are often the cheapest source of parts for old Porches, and many sellers on eBay just buy parts from them and add a mark up. They were able to get me a blower motor and gave me a decent discount so it ended up about £130 instead of £160. I should have just gone there to start with. I drive over there in the 924 and on the way back had a FTP.

Pulled up at a small rural crossroads, went to pull away and stalled then wouldn’t restart. After much troubleshooting and using ‘phone a friend’ we diagnosed it as a faulty Fuel Pump Relay. FPR FTP FTW! These are known to fail over time so not unusual. I was about 5 miles from home so I used the little wire adaptor I had in the tool kit in the boot to bypass the FPR and get me home. So I din’t need recovering which was nice.

Just a few minutes after I took these photos, so it was a very picturesque breakdown on a beautiful stretch of the Pilgrims Way near the Kent/Surrey border.

What wasn’t nice thoughts discovering very quickly that the Fuel Pump Relay for a Porsche 924 is NLA. Not at all. Not even is USA or that Germany. No where. It’s also unique FPR to the 924 so there aren’t any in the old VW/Audi model archive that are compatible.

924 FPR NLA WTF??? So the 924 became a garden ornament for the summer while I looked around for one over and over again. It turns out this is a problem for a number of 924 owners. There  would appear to be a number of these driving around routinely with the fuel pump relay bridged and a bodged  switch fitted to manually turn the fuel pump on and off. I have a couple of discussion with other owners about 3d printing an adaptor plug so we could use an identical spec one we found but with different pin arrangement.

Alex (924 turbo mentioned up thread) knows an awesome auto electrician so we hatched a plan to give him my broken FPR along with a working one to see if he could reverse engineer a repair.  I would be the guniea pig and test, then if it worked we/he could offer a FPR repair service for other owners. So that’s what happened. It took a couple of months to sort out but mine got fixed, he did a couple of other FPRs that we checked and they worked faultlessly, He now charges £40 to swap a broken FPR for a fixed one.

So it was all very frustrating and a bit mad that these are vital components and are NLA, but eventually it got sorted and also lead to a solution for other 924 owners who can now get their FPR rebuilt rather than living with a dangerous bodge to run fuel pump without any built in cut off in case of accident.

BTW it was during this fun summer period when the 924 was non running that our Mini started rattling on startup and needed a new cam belt and the kits were unavailable so that was off the road. Then one Friday afternoon the A2 shat it’s starter motor leaving us with none out of 3 cars running so I was forced to fix the A2 starter motor over a very hot July weekend so the Mrs could commute to work on Monday morning. This situation spelled the end for the A2 as we realised we needed one newish, dependable car (Don’t worry, I mean newish as in less than 20yrs old) and that became the Mazda 6 estate bought a few weeks later, making us a 4 car family for a couple of months until the A2 was sold.

[somewhatfoolish]

The rodent infestation must be really frustrating; are they trap or poison resistant?

[inconsistant]

June 2023

With the Fuel Pump Relay not working and the car unusable I decided to it was time to replace the blower motor, since the old one had packed up over a year ago! I pulled the brittle plastic cap off the top trying really hard not to break the old brittle plastic tabs that it hinges up and down on. But obviously I did break one of them. But that's ok, I have the other cap from the spare housing so would replace it with that one. 

 

Hacksawed very carefully through the support fins, motor out, housing cradle off and clipped onto new motor, then got a hoover down the hole to get rid of all the mouse acorn storage debris. Cleaned all the old factory sealant off the bodywork from the seal around the shroud cover, and got to work doing by best, tidiest neatest ever aralditing. Which obviously is almost impossible because it’s sticky and messy and almost impossible to control what it ends up getting all over Somehow I managed to do a super job, lovely and neat, none dripped onto the motor or fan blades, it all went where it needed to go and no where else. I was very pleased with myself. I set up a bit of wire to hold the motor in place to take the weight off the fins while they were curing to make sure there wasn’t any movement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s a fairly fine tolerance between the fan blades and the housing it sits in so the location needs to be really accurate. But I managed it. Yippee! With the Araldite curing nicely I decided to finish the job off and get the motor plugged back in, the brittle plastic cap back on, obviously I broke BOTH tabs on the replacement cap trying to prize it back on so ended up putting the original back on as it only had one broken tab but still seemed to work ok. Old brittle plastic eh?

I then fitted the shroud back into place. Yes, OBVIOUSLY I’d checked the motor worked properly before fitting it and it span beautifully, fast and almost silent. Fitting an untested motor then finding out it didn’t work is the sort of thing amateur me would have done but I feel like I’ve learned a bit about expecting the worst and being prepared!

I did a lovely job of applying and fingered the black sealant off nice and smooth. I'd put tape down to protect the bodywork around it too. I was especially keen for there to be tonnes of the stuff around the join to stop the mouse thinking he could just have a little nibble and be through. Fingered it off nicely and was pleased with my work. Not quite factory spec fingering off but not bad anyway. Tidied up, opened a beer and looked forward to tomorrow when everything would have cured and I would have a lovely smooth powerful blower motor again.

 

 

 

The following morning I jumped in, ignition on, slid the fan speed lever to the right and.... Nothing.

Gutted. No fan movement, no motor noise.  I was properly gutted. I had to cut through my awesomely fingered off sealant  to see what had happened. The motor wouldn't turn. Immediately I assumed I'd got araldite in the motor and had managed to stop it spinning. but then I realised the motor was dragging on the housing. I couldn't understand why because the motor position was perfect. I felt a couple of the  araldited fins and 4 of the 6 popped off in my hand. The glue was still a bit tacky. I had obviously used some old out of date araldite that hadn't fully cured.

The lumps of glue on the joints were still a bit soft. I mixed up some more from the same pack and left it a couple of hours and the same happened. I bought another pack and did the same and the new stuff was rich hard within an hour. Bollocks. I was going to have to do the job all over again, motor out and clean up the glue from the fins and do it all again. I was so fed up by the whole blower motor saga I just disconnected the motor popped the shroud back on with the fixings and decided to come back to it later in the summer.

I had read  somewhere that mice didn't like steel  wool so I took the car back to the garage and packed the shroud with as much of it as I could find. Try eating through that you little shit.

[inconsistant]

July 2023

When I bought the car I changed the coolant and checked out the condition of the rubber hoses as a precaution. I noticed a build up of bits of rusty metal that were coating the inside of the rubber hoses. There's a section of metal hose that connects the radiator to the thermostat (sort of) and looking at mine it had got very rusty at each end and was starting to disintegrate.

 

 

Another NLA part so I got hold of a decent used one through the 924oc.  I gave it a good clean up with the intention of fitting it and noticed a couple of tiny pin prick holes near one end. I decided I'll drill them out a bit bigger to remove any  rusty edges and fill the holes with weld. So I did that, I cleaned up the welds so they wouldn't chafe on the hose when connected, and I put a few coats of black hammerite I found in the shed  over each end but forgot to take any after photos.

 

 

 

My repaired Fuel Pump Relay finally came back so we fitted it and went for a drive. My chum had a spare FPR we took with us too just in case the repaired one failed, but it worked beautifully.  Photo of the car with fixed Fuel Pump Relay.. Probably., I can't remember whenI took this but I'll stick it here anyway

[inconsistant]

Also July 2023

With the 924 now back up and running after a couple of months of non use I took the opportunity to pop along to our local pub breakfast meet and there was an excellent turn out.