Porsche 914 – January 2012 – #45
I have the engine and tranny out, removed all of the guts of the car and I have it mounted to the rotisserie to start the massive amount of metal work. Today I prepared the engine to be mounted to the rebuild stand.
I think that when we (the royal we) like the design of something or the feedback in how it makes us feel and that gives us an admiration for the people who design and build the things we use everyday. I have always been impressed with Porsche and Volkswagen cars and especially the engines, I started working on them and observing their designs with my best friend Jon whose dad owned the Porsche repair shop we lived next door to when we go out of high school. The whole existence of a Porsche 911 IMO is to wrap that fabulous boxer engine in enough metal to safely sit in front of it. In the older Porsche’s (my favorites) they are are not designed as luxury cars in any way, they are designed to connect you to the engine and the unique sensation of that placement has when driving a mid-engined or rear-engined car. The boxer design is amazing in it’s efficiency of materials and power to weight ratio. If you have ever worked on a big V8, you realize that America’s prowess in the production of steel was a big factor in the way we designed our cars with lots of weight and lots of steel. Very little attention was given to efficiency and this is where boxer engine design is elegant.
I am removing the engine as part of the body restoration and I have a bunch of upgrades for the engine to modernize. #1 is replacing the heads with RS tuned heads from Jake Raby. Next is a full conversion to a modern ignition systems from Clewett that will match the high end fuel injection system I did last year, not more breakdowns with the old analogue Bosch stuff.
Feynman Stamp
Mark pointed me to the USPS site which has finally released a Richard Feynman stamp as part of the American Scientists series. Click here to view, you can preorder, from here
Stealing Rare Plants
Several years ago there was a local thief stealing rare Black Trilliums and I thought that was really strange, but the money these plants get justified it for the thieves. I read the Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean and realized there are some nutty folks obsessed with Orchid’s and there is a whole underground around rare plants. Now imagine stealing a Corpse Flower that would be cool to have in your front room!
The thieves were after cycads, palmlike plants so prized that a rare specimen can fetch $20,000 or more on the international black market. Some species have been around since the time of the dinosaurs but are now close to extinction. Read…
Fish Gopher
I love adventure shows and books that deal with underwater exploration. One of my favorites was the book "Ship of Gold in a Deep Blue Sea" that documented the engineering associated with discovery of the USS California that went down with a huge bounty of gold right after the Civil War.
The biggest cost and peril to these expeditions is the "Rover" or the unmanned craft used to do the underwater filming and retrieval. Now the ever inventive Chinese have developed a fish that is complelty mechanical. This could be a very interesting innovation.
These Blues is Killin' Me 