4. DISASTER
The plan was for a short trip to the local auto parts shop, then a nice drive down the Old Pacific Highway & back home. Well, I got to the shop, parked the car in their parking area, & as it is on a bit of a slope running down to the shopfront, I thought that an extra notch on the handbrake would be a good idea. With the shopping done, I get back into the car & try to start it - a couple of sluggish revs out of the starter, then the clicking of the solenoid (flat battery, I assumed). And so started an interesting sequence of events :
The Day's Events :
- Open rear clip, borrow a jump-start battery pack & connect to battery
- Try to start, & get exactly the same result
- Bystander shouts "FIRE"
- I look around to see clouds of smoke rising from the back of the engine compartment
- I switch off the ignition, grab the fire extinguisher & jump out
- As I get to the back, I can see a nice little fire going around the back of the starter
- I point the fire extinguisher at the fire, & the car decides to move off down the slope
- Having followed the car some 8 feet, it stops suddenly - brick walls have this effect !
- Fire gets extinguished
- Some colourful language !
- Tow truck summoned & the car is returned home
- Tow truck can not fit up our battle-axe driveway, so the car is dumped in the street
- Kind chap from the local garage comes over with his 4wd & drags the thing up the drive to the house
- I pour myself a large scotch
Diagnosis :
- When the handbrake was pulled on hard, I had failed to notice how much the main handbrake cable assembly moved
(the DRB has a self-balancing setup where the inner core pulls a slider on one side & the outer sheath pulls a slider on the other side).
- The handbrake cable assembly pulled up against the main battery feed terminal on the starter with the handbrake on hard
- Over the last couple of years, this finally wore thru the plastic coating of the handbrake cable, so this day was "arc-welding day" !
- With the inner spiral steel cable sheath arcing to the starter terminal, the remaining surrounding plastic sheathing caught fire
- This fire was cleverly located just under the hydraulic hose running to the clutch slave cylinder
- Being rubber, this hose caught fire too, melted, then fed clutch fluid onto the fire - there was so much smoke that I thought Lucas had escaped !!
- The heat from the conflagration surrounding the handbrake cable caused things to expand enough to ease off the handbrake
- In my panic to get out of the car with a fire-extinguisher, I totally forgot to shove it back in gear
- Gravity then took over for a while - until it was quickly brought under control by the corner of a brick wall !
Consequences :
- Upon reflection, I figured that I got off fairly lightly. It might have happened on a big hill with no brick wall in the way - not a pleasant thought.
- I was going to have to do some glasswork anyway - to clear the front tyres from the guard / tank-cover lips (caused by the wheel spacers)
- I was also planning to eventually do other glasswork on the front clip :
- Open up the fake NACA ducts in the guards
- Strengthen under the flat sections (across the nose, & just in front of the windscreen) to get rid of some sink-holes & general ripples
- Hollow out the insides of the recesses for the clip latches to provide more clearance for the brackets on the chassis
- Given the above, a full resto on the front clip was started - oddly enough, the repair of the crunched-in nose was the easy bit
- Opening up the NACA ducts & making short extension ducts under the clip was not all that easy
- The "weather guy" hates me : every time that I had things prepped ready for sealer, primer, etc, the heavens opened !
( I reckon that I could make a living by driving around drought-stricken areas in a freshly primed GT40 & with a spray-gun on my belt ) !!
I finally finished all the repairs & mods on the front clip (including re-inforcing under the flat sections of the nostril panel). The latter just seemed like "a good idea" at the time, so I finished that & let it cure for a couple of weeks, Then I blocked back the top surface & discovered the distortion caused at the front corners by the prang ! (You can see the yellow primer showing thru in the "after" pic - I had to sand away 4 coats of clear & 4 coats of colour, plus some old primer, to get it flat !).
So with all that done & primed/re-primed, the car is off to a professional painter next Tuesday for a full run of colour/clear over the front clip & nostril panel (I have had to wait over a month for the painter, so it had better be a damn good job !).
After that, it will be some catch-up time - just driving the car for a while. THEN, its onto the next project - a gearbox re-build !! I had the G50 rebuilt (& a higher ratio 5th installed) a couple of years ago by Albins Off Road Gear here in Oz. All my research told me that these guys were the "bee's knees" when it comes to Porsche boxes - supposedly, they supply gearsets all over the world. Well I could not have been more disappointed - after shipping interstate to Victoria, the box came back with no 2nd gear & a really bad whine from the new 5th gear set. So out with the box again, send it back to Albins - "terribly sorry, but we did put the 2nd gear synchro in wrong, but won’t have a replacement 5th gearset available for 6 months" !! They fixed the synchro problem & sent the box back, then sent me a new 5th gearset a few months later. There is no way that I will send the box back to these bozos, but Jim C has a local contact in Sydney who sounds like a much better proposition.
I’ll let you know how this goes !
Kind Regards,
Peter D.
