June 2013 Porsche Club Meeting

The first Wednesday of each month, the Red River chapter of the Porsche Club of America has its meeting. This month we met at a new venue, the Confusion Corner Bar and Grill at Osborne and Corydon, just about 5 minutes drive from our new house ;-)

The venue has a lot to recommend it and I'm glad we'll be meeting there. The rooftop patio is a nice place to eat, and the staff are great, even roping off parking spots in the lot for our cars.

This was one of the coolest - an original Porsche 914-6. Two-liter power from a flat-six 911 engine powered this rare mid-engine Porsche, and not many originals survive today, although clones abound. This example is a real beauty with a nice patina of age.

A nice variety of Porsches of all ages and configurations... watercooled front engine all wheel drive, watercooled rear engine rear wheel drive, watercooled front engine rear wheel drive, aircooled rear engine rear wheel drive...

A young fella from the local dealer brought a very nice new Cayman to show off.

Mid-engine layout leaves not much room for stowage.

Cabin looks nice but rather unremarkable. Could be a Mercedes, Lexus or BMW if not for the crest on the wheel.

 A tidy 996-generation coupe.

Cayman again. I think I would have one of these in preference to a new 911, not as if I could afford either one but still...

After the meeting we typically take a short drive for ice cream. As the rest of the group was dawdling, my pal Andy and I decided to take the initiative and run out as a convoy of two... my white '85 911 and his black '87. His car doesn't half look good from the back, I have to say.

Garage Activity! and Pony Corral Cruise Night

One of the great things about finally having a garage is the cool storage stuff you can buy for it! I think the first thing that I got after we bought the house was this tire rack to mount on the wall, as I am sick of either a) keeping wheels in the basement and lugging them up and down stairs, or b) paying the dealer$hip $50/year to store my wheels for me.

The thing went together fine with a minimum of cursing or disassembly/reassembly. It seems to hold the set of 17" VW alloy wheels up there with reasonable security, and despite the strange perspective in this photo, it IS level... I even used a bubble level when assembling it ;-)

GARAGE!!! so awesome to have a garage.

Later on I took the Porsche out to the Pony Corral for cruise night. Not a lot going on there but saw a nice Triumph GT6 on Minilites. I really dig this car for some reason - it is TINY.

Can you guess what this is? Had to take a picture of the awesome machine-turned aluminum dashboard of this Turbo Trans-Am. I remember quite clearly taking a ride in the back of a Turbo T-A driven by my first girlfriend's cool/scary older sister back in the '80s, and the distinctive dashboard really stuck with me. Dynamically the car was probably junk but that dash was just so... cool (I'm sorry to keep using that word but it just seems to fit so well).

Some kids playing "Chinese fire drill" (can we still say that?) in matching Mercedes 450 (left) and 280 (right)SLs. I think (hope) that the cars belonged to their families. I kept an eye on them when they ran over to the newish Aston Martin convertible (just behind the yellow 240Z at upper left) but their shenanigans were not repeated. There were people having their pictures taken beside the Aston which I thought was just a bit weird.

The Mercedes were obviously well-used but tidy.

Bradley GT... dear God. Chacun a son gout and all that, but maybe give it a wash and clean the trash out of the interior. That's all I'm sayin'.

Rear three-quarter view of the GT6 Mk3; tastily styled by Michellotti. Need this as eye-bleach for the Bradley.

As I say there was really not too much of interest for me at the cruise this week. A guy applying tire dressing to his new Subaru WRX; some OK British stuff including a Triumph Spitfire, older Mini and MGB; Mustang club with new Mustangs that have interesting styling but being new, are somewhat "meh" for people who like old cars; and finally some real "WTFs" like the Bradley and a "Raptor" pickup truck. I know it will pick up (ha) as the summer continues.

Later, skaters...

BMW Demo Day - S1000RR test ride

Yesterday over the lunch hour I headed down to our local BMW motorcycle dealer, Wildwood Sports, to participate in a demo day ride on the S1000RR superbike. I'd been booked to ride this model in the demo ride last year too, but the bike ended up not being available as it had been crashed on a demo in Calgary :-(

No such bad luck this year as the double-R arrived intact and ready to go.

BMW had brought a wide selection of bikes for riders to try out. It cost $30 to participate in the demo ride but this money was donated to charity. The dealership provided sandwiches and donuts which was nice as I didn't have time to get lunch otherwise!

The weather started cloudy, which was concerning to me since I'd only brought a dark tinted visor for my helmet, but soon the clouds parted and the weather was bright and sunny for the ride.

This was "my" ride... a 2013 S1000RR in "Granite Grey Metallic Matt". A gorgeous bike with a spec sheet to match: 193bhp pushing only 203kg wet weight...

I don't have a very broad experience of liter sportbikes (modern ones I mean; I don't really count my Ducati 900SS/SP or the old GSX-R1100) but riding this bike blew me away. Great power everywhere in the rev range, telekinetic handling, and even "reasonable" comfort although the seat pad got pretty firm after an hour's riding.

Of course, being a factory demo ride, the opportunities to stretch the performance envelope are necessarily limited, especially with road traffic, semi-trailers and "Farmer Palmer" pootling along at 80km/h in a 90-limit... but the one time I got to twist the throttle a bit the bike responded ferociously but perfectly controllably. Nobody "needs" this much motorcycle for the street but my response to those who say "it's dangerous" is always the same... it takes a rider to twist the throttle and the bike only goes as fast as the rider makes it. Personally I would rarely ever use even one-tenth of the performance this bike offers but WOW, it sure was fun.
  

Later, talking to the dealer principal, I found out that this machine was still in its break-in period and was subject to a special rev-limiter at 9,000rpm or so. I wouldn't have known as I never took it over 8 grand or thereabouts, still more than enough to see 1XX km/h on the digital speedo ;-)
   

Cockpit is tidy and functional as you'd expect a high-end BMW to be.

Some nice detailing here - I like the styling of the stubby exhaust canister and the neat alloy pegs. Some vibration is transmitted through the pegs but it didn't seem particularly intrusive.

Monster radial calipers give massive braking power. Will stand you on your ear if you're not careful!
 

I personally quite like the asymmetrical headlight styling treatment, although I recognize it might not be to everyone's taste. Distinctive, though, yes?

Thanks to Wildwood and BMW for an enjoyable noontime ride. The S1000RR is a sublime machine and I would love to own one. The ante in this game, however, is not insignificant (~$17K and change), and I don't think that I would ride this bike enough for that to make sense. Come a lottery win, though, the double-R would be the liter-bike I'd choose to own for sure - albeit probably in the white/blue/red "Motorsport" colour scheme ;-) 

Hibernation Time

It's that time of year again, actually well past that time. The 911 has been put away for almost a month but I had to visit it tonight to make sure the heaters were shut off (they weren't) - important on air cooled cars because the heater boxes can allow four-legged things to get into your car. Not good.

 Anyway she's tucked up tight now and should be good until Spring, or until I get a garage of my own to move her to, whichever comes first. And we're looking at garages again (well, garages with houses attached) tomorrow. Fingers crossed ;-)

Porsche Club of America Meeting, 5 September

The first Wednesday of each month is the regular meeting night for the Red River chapter of the Porsche Club of America, of which I am a member. We meet at a local restaurant and have a meal, then repair outside to ogle each others' cars. This is followed by a brisk drive over to some local cafe for a coffee or ice cream.

There was a pretty good turnout this week so I tried to get some pictures of the cars to post here. Above is my own car, in front of two Targas, both "911SC" models of the 1978-83 period. The SC is fairly renowned as an excellent, reliable car, powered by the 3-litre version of the venerable Porsche flat-six. My own car is the next generation from the SC - the Carrera 3.2. The ducktail is non-stock, of course ;-)
  

The new Boxster is quite handsome, yes? It's a much more muscular looking car than the 986 it replaces, and has a real "presence".

To me the new headlights are reminiscent of the Carrera GT...?

A new member showed up driving a 2013 911 Carrera S ("991"). As you can see it drew quite a crowd.

I'm not sure about the chrome "Porsche" script from an aesthetic perspective but it's a design choice Porsche has evidently made on all of its models. I guess maybe I miss the full-width reflector that last appeared on the 993 model, the last of the air-cooled 911s.

The 991's interior is quite luxurious. Notable is the seven-speed manual transmission, a first in a production car. Lots of gears to shift, and the owner said his left leg was getting quite a workout.

Two Boxsters of newer and older varieties, with 944 and 996.

 Rear three-quarter view of the 991 is gorgeous, and is the car's best angle, according to its stylist.

After hanging for a bit at the restaurant lot we decamped for a local gelato joint. 996 cabrio in the foreground.

991 leads the lineup.

928, Boxster, 996, then it gets too dark ;-)

Fun to hang out with some cool cars and have a gelato and a chat. It was a nice night but got pretty cool as it got darker... I guess that's the way things are going now. I miss summer :-(

GSX-R1100 go/no go

It seems like forever, but it's *only* been a couple years now since my Dad and I bought a moderately decrepit 1986 Suzuki GSX-R1100G as a restoration project. I always liked the brutal simplicity of the original "slab-side" GSX-R, and it has historical significance as the bike that brought the low-mass revolution (and the whole racer-replica genre) to the street.

I figured it would just bne a cosmetic refresh, since the bike seemed to run well enough when I test rode it. A bit of a rumble from the bottom end, but just typical Suzuki cam-chain adjustment, right?... wrong. Mega-buck rebuild and two years later, we got our decal set from the UK, dropped off panels with the painter and set back to work.

Newly powder-coated wheels look nice, eh? $$$

Fast friends. Once the one on the left is running properly it will be MUCH faster than the red one...

Wheeled out into the light for a couple photos. This summer I resolved to head in to Brandon and help Dad get the machine running, or get it ready to sell. I had a brand-new MAC exhaust to install that we wrestled mightily with, but it turned out not to be fit-able. So back on went the stock header sans rusty canister. And still the bloody thing wouldn't run right or idle without the choke.

So here is a dilemma. Once you have so much money invested in a project, can you sell it on without bringing it to fruition? This was the "go/no go" decision point. We thought long and hard about it, let me tell you. But the answer is no, for simple economic reasons. Nobody in their right mind pays any kind of decent money for a half-completed non-running project bike. So we just have to belly up and finish it. I think that when it's running well we'll be glad we stuck with this one. Or at least we'll be in a much better position to get a decent buck for it.

So the carb rack has been sent off to Oklahoma for rebuilding by a recommended marque expert, and a second exhaust system obtained from eBay and picked up in Pembina, ND today. Once the carbs are back we can bolt them up and fit up the exhaust, and (fingers crossed) have a runner. Then it's just a matter of wiring the signals back up and bolting on the panels... right???

World's Trickest Engine Lid Prop???

After putting a fibreglass ducktail engine lid on my Carrera 3.2, I found that the lid wouldn't sit right. This was caused by the tension in the stock shock absorber that holds the lid open. The lightweight ducktail is too light to fully compress the shock and is weak in torsion, too, so the shock twists the lid, preventing it from sitting correctly. Problem!!

Solution: Seine Systems "Ulitimate Strut" - a carbon fibre prop rod. All hardware is supplied for hassle-free installation, no drilling* (in most applications, read on).

Unlike the photos on the Seine Systems website, which show left-side installation, Carrera 3.2's with air conditioning (like mine) require right-side installation. All you need to do is identify the appropriate hole (ahem) on the hinge, *radius it a bit with a drill, and fit the attached hardware.

Cut the rod to length with a hand saw and slip on the supplied "foot", then slip the sleeve over the join and heat it up with a hairdryer or heat gun to shrink it to fit. The foot slips into a bolt head as shown, when in use. The kit comes with a replacement bolt with a recessed head, which you use to replace the appropriate bolt in the engine compartment.

Seine Systems supplies a rubber sleeve to tuck the rod away when not required. This attaches to the ducktail lid and the rod just nestles in there nicely.

Despite what my friend Andy says, this is probably not the world's most expensive 2x4. At about $40 I think it is a useful and elegant solution to a real problem and let's face it, who doesn't love carbon fibre???

The Seine Systems Ultimate Strut is available to fit 911, 912 and 964 applications front and rear, and 993 rear. If you want to buy one, go here.