11/5/16
The 912 sat all week. I had no choice after last week’s adventure but to leave it in the driveway . I spent the week working, and the 912 was in no shape to be driven. Furthermore, my car pushing helpers were unavailable, as Kim was back at her apartment and working and Kris was still sick, hopefully not because she pushed the car last week.
On Monday, I pulled the trigger on a new coil. It was not expensive. The cost was less than the towing fees I paid in September because I had not upgraded my AAA membership in a timely manner, but that’s another story. The coil was delivered by mid week, turning out to be a blessing and a curse. The good news was that I had it in my possession. The bad news was that I had to look at it for a couple of days before trying to install it, making me feel somewhat apprehensive and stressed. In theory changing the coil should be pretty simple. Just unplug some wires, remove some bolts, remove the old coil, put in the new coil, put back the bolts and reconnect the wires. Simple. In theory.
Throughout my life, cars have epitomized the most complex of devices to me. I was fascinated by them, but never really had the confidence to touch them in a mechanical way. I have never intentionally removed a single part from a car. I think I secretly wanted to take auto shop in high school, but, for a myriad of reasons, was too afraid. Time passed and then cars and life really got complicated, driving any thought of tinkering with them from my consciousness. Pam would argue that those thoughts should have stayed far away. And they would have been if I hadn’t got my first Cayman and subsequently joined the Porsche Club a couple of years ago. Since then I have spent a lot of time around cars and car guys, and my interest in tinkering with cars has resurfaced.
There are no words to describe my mechanical ability because I have none. To put it in perspective, Pam changes the light bulbs in the house. I do the laundry. Pam does the plumbing in the house. I do the cooking. The thought of f***ing something up is so overwhelming that it prevents me from taking it apart. I once had a Masters Swim coach, an ex Olympian, who had an acronym, NEBAB, which stood for Never Ever Been Athletic Before, for people who joined the swim team and had no athletic skills. When it comes to being mechanical, my swim coach would have referred to me as a NEBMB, where the M stood for Mechanical. He would have pronounced it NEE-BOMB. And it would have fit.
I am a conceptual guy. I can look at almost anything and understand how it works, I just have a fear of tinkering with it. I like to get my hands “dirty” analyzing data, building spreadsheets, writing some computer code, and doing complex financial calculations. I haven’t turned a wrench in decades, and when I last did, it was under the extremely close supervision of one my high school friends who was a mechanical savant. So just looking at the box with the new coil in it made me a little nervous. It also made me a little excited. I bought the 1977 911 to try to learn to do some mechanical tasks. As I have written about before, that project went up in smoke before I did a single mechanical thing to it. Now I have the 912, and I have not done anything to it myself, partly because my garage is still not rebuilt and what few tools I have are in storage and partly because I have not had the courage to take anything apart.
But all of that was about to change with the coil project. To slightly misquote Lao Tzu, It represented my first step on a journey of 1,000 miles. Or so I hoped. My confidence, though a little shaky, was buoyed because the 912 was running like shit, and I thought my mechanical ministrations could not make it much worse.
So I gathered up my courage and my $20 socket set from Pep Boys, peeled the car cover off the back end of the 912, opened the rear lid, memorized where each wire was attached, removed the wires from the old coil, took a deep breath, and started to take out the bolt on the left of the coil. The bolt came out easily, too easily. It was short and nothing was behind it.
I began to work on the bolt on the right. After turning and turning it for some time, I realized that it was not any looser than when I started. Because the new coil came with a mounting bracket, I assumed that I should just take the old coil off by removing the old mounting bracket and then reattaching the new coil using the new mounting bracket. Big mistake. It took me about 10 minutes and some help from the electrician, who was working on my garage project, to realize that the right bolt was really long and had a nut attached to it on the back end, which was inconveniently located behind the fan shroud. I could barely reach the nut with my fingers. I had no way to see it. Thinking a box end wrench would be small enough to get behind the shroud and hold the nut in place, I headed out to buy a set of them. I again opted for a really cheap set, as I would be buying nice tools once the garage was fixed. I returned and proceeded to try to get a wrench on the nut again. Same result. No way to get it done.
At that time Jeff, my neighbor not my Tequila mentor, walked over. He was happy to see me wrenching in my driveway, not a sight that is prevalent in my neighborhood. He offered his tools in case my meager assortment was not sufficient. Then he said, “Never mind. They are all in storage.” We both laughed because he has been rebuilding his house for almost two years, and his tools have been in storage the entire time. Then he said, “Maybe we can get at it thru the rear seat.” We both discounted that idea immediately. His question, though, did make me re-think my strategy, causing me to look, really look, at the new coil. I had been so fixated on getting the old one out that I had never looked at how the mounting bracket was attached to the new coil. The bracket was not integrated, but it was affixed by tightening a long screw which had a nut on the end. At that point I realized I did not need to remove the existing coil and bracket, I just needed to loosen the bracket that was affixed to the old coil and slide the old coil out of the old bracket. After some maneuvering and beating myself up over my own stupidity, I was able to loosen the bracket and slide the existing coil out. From that point is was easy to slide the new coil in, tighten the retaining screw and plug in the wires.
With the new coil in place, I nervously sat in the driver’s seat and turned the key. …. …. … The 912 started immediately. The tach behaved nicely as I revved the 912 in the driveway. With newfound confidence I backed it out and drove it around the neighborhood. This time after about five laps I was able to drive it right back into my driveway. No pushing required. I had taken the first step on my journey of 1,000 miles.