In high school, my friends and I managed to resuscitate a 914 that had been stowed away in a garage for over a decade. We towed it to the top of a hill with a pickup truck and attempted a clutch start after we'd picked up some speed. None of us (especially me in the driver's seat) expected this to work, but amazingly it fired right up. One of my friends managed to jog alongside and jump into the car as I tried to keep it puttering along, and we ripped a few laps around the neighborhood. Soonafter, we stopped the engine and were never able to get it started again. Thanks for bringing up this memory. Cool article.
This is one of my favorite styles of writing. I have absolutely no clue what this person is talking about and have no interest in cars, yet I read every single word.
I love when people have such a deep knowledge of something that they can write an essay as unique and thoughtful as this. It reminds me of Kitchen Confidential, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman!, or any rant about British politics by David Mitchell.
This story reminded me of the time I was trying to exploit a web app as part of a bounty programme.
Unfortunately the application was so unstable that any attempts to SQLI, or really send any kind of malformed request would simply crash the entire site for hours, presumably until an admin came and restarted the server. DoS wasn't included in the programme so I never won a bounty. I'm sure it could have been exploited, but it was simply so rickety and shoddy that I couldn't figure out how.
> The dual Webers don’t have chokes and you’ll be squirting fuel down the barrels with the accelerator pumps for the necessary priming regime.
The engineering Puritan will want to know that the Webers are a retrofit, a hack for escape from the factory's refractory -- but cutting edge tech in the 70s! -- VW electronic fuel injection. The EFI "brain" was a box the size of a small modern laptop, stuffed with individual transistors, inductors, capacitors and resistors.
No one in North America, it seemed, had any idea how to diagnose an internal fault. The owner's options were to buy a secondhand brain taken from a junked car, presumably there for some other reason, or the Webers. Junkyard brains were refundable, but the several hours installing, testing, and possibly uninstalling were not, so careful deliberation was in order.
Access to the brain, like most engine compartment work on the 914, demanded the sort of agility, strength, and determination required of large-animal veterinarians, with access for most tasks from underneath, wedged as it was in a sort of triangular gap below and behind the seats and ahead of the rear trunk and transmission.
I had to diagnose an issue with said brain on a car from 1982.
Previous owners could not figure out the issue. The car's engine would rev "bounce" at idle like it had a big cam, but it didn't go away when driving, making driving not very fun. So I got the Scirocco for dirt cheap.
I realized on day that if you opened and closed the hood a couple times, the issue would fix it self, and it was very repeatable.
I realized the computer is mounted next to the hood hinge!
I got lucky and just blindly resoldering all the joints in the computer fixed it.
We later swapped that 400k mile motor setup to a modern turbo motor with a sequential gearbox, and it's a rally car now. :)
(not super important to story but the "ECU" from 1982 was a bit more modern, Jetronic as it was called was "only" roughly the size of a few old TI-82s).
> Depress the clutch as you would in any car, and pull the knob from its secure location out of first gear. Now you will become adrift in the zone known to early Porsche owners as “Neverland” and your quest will be to find second gear. Prepare yourself for a ten-second-or-so adventure. Do not go straight forward with the shift knob, as you will only find Reverse waiting there to mock you with a shriek of high-speed gear teeth machining themselves into round cylinders.
> and then rapidly wig-wag the shift knob side-to-side along a lateral axis.
I learned this driving my first car which was a similar vintage Karmann Ghia. It still did it out of habit twenty years later driving my stick-shift Jetta. The second YouTube video I found of someone learning to drive a KG was doing it instinctively as well. [1] I guess there's so much play you just learn to wig-wag a little to see if you're in gear or not.
It’s a better pattern for racing since you can more easily shift between 2nd and 3rd gear in a quicker way. Older Ferraris (I believe the Testarossa and the TR512, but maybe others too) also have the same pattern.
What a blast from the past. I learnt to drive using a VW Golf, and I've always thought this shift pattern is just standard on German cars with manual transmission (at least in the 90s).
One thing I don't see mentioned is that you first have to press down onto the knob, then shift forward, in order to shift the transmission into R. Simply pushing the knob forward won't go from N to R.
I am eagerly awaiting the opportunity to stick this into docs or a tutorial someday. What a brilliant line that really captures that thrill of a newcomer to a problem feeling like they've accomplished something only to find the worst is yet to come.
Speaking of security through obscurity, my car is a 96 Nissan and it's had a few attempts on it. It's easy enough to steal, but it's getting hard enough for me to find replacement parts that I'd be surprised if thieves have everything, so I take some bits of the car with me if it's sitting for a while.
I have a quick release wheel to deter the average opportunist from breaking my glass and ignition barrel, and with some wiring trickery and the bits I remove it's never going to start. It's aftermarket enough that stock parts won't help the thief, so unless they have a laptop, an aftermarket ECU, and a tuner handy, they probably won't get far.
Sucks to have to bother with all that, but alarms have never helped me, and you just can't fix woeful 90s physical security.
One attempt on my car was only foiled because when I park up at my girlfriends house, I remove some 90s era fuses you can't get anymore and take the box covers with me. A paperclip would work, but you've got to figure out that the specific fuses are missing first.
It's not about being perfect when it comes to car security, it's about being too much of a pain in the ass, so they'll give up and move on. Just like bicycle security.
My first car was a 914. Love and miss it to this day.
At some point the solenoid died (or some other electrical component). So to start it, you'd have to reach under the car with a screwdriver (or some other piece of metal, but I kept a screwdriver in the car for this purpose), and short out across two terminals.
You then had 10-20 seconds to get out from under the car, into the driver's seat, and turn the key. As a practiced manouver, it was pretty quick.
Seriously, same thought. The Miata is this but without anything after the first paragraph. It starts and runs instantly, is fuel injected, brakes well, and the transmission is notably direct feeling. It is the feeling of a good day in the 914 every day (and thus worse, because you do not know the bad days). I guess this guy went though hell to define such a great car.
Reliable, fun, and economical. The only thing they lack is practicality, being a two-seater with a small trunk. But if you don't have to worry about carrying kids or cargo, they're great cars!
edit: just got to the author’s blurb at the bottom. He was an engineer on the original Miata, so it’s no surprise that he knows what he’s talking about.
It's not always the dog in the fight, but the fight in the dog.
I knew a guy that was an incredible mountain biker, won all the races he entered etc. He used to show up with crappy bikes probably 10lbs heavier than everyone else... he'd still win. Sometimes you either have it or you don't, and all the equipment in the world won't help you.
That’s a funny sport. For years the SF area events were dominated by a guy who ran a ‘78 Toyota Corolla hatchback. Or what had once been that car, anyway.
Reminds me of my first car, a Mini Clubman estate with the fake woody panels on the side. The only thing you needed to know was that it had been re-engined with a hill-climb tuned Cooper S engine. Great on an island with a 40mph speed limit and too many rich folk with Ferraris and the like, as it could out accelerate them anywhere on the island. Sure it wouldn't go faster than 50, but that was fine as it got to that speed almost instantaneously.
My friend in high school had a Mercury Capri like that. Dad was a drag racer, so that thing could beat anything up to 75mph. Then it'd rattle itself to bits.
Great article! Makes me wonder if in 40 years people will write about how to (not) get an old Tesla Roadster or BMW i3 going again? Although, rather than pumping the acceleration 4 times to get enough gas into the engine so it will start, that will probably begin with hacking the car's system so it allows you to start it...
I've been saying for a while now, there will be no more 'classic cars' starting after the mid-1990's because of the failure of electronic parts that will not be able to be replaced. The best that will happen is people using the shells to 'restomod' them into new cars that look old. Even today, it's much easier for a beginner to buy a broken 1970's car and get it running than a broken 1990's car.
My first car was a 68 Mustang, which was a gorgeous heap of junk. At one point, the clutch just completely gave up and wedged itself in the “engaged” position. To get the car moving, I had to kill the engine, put it in 1st gear, and turn the key to run the starter. This pulled the whole car into enough motion to get the engine going, then I could synchro shift all I wanted until it came time to stop again. For that cursed month, I got very good at finding routes that didn’t involve stop lights or long lines of slow moving traffic.
I had a car where the shifter broke to the automatic transmission - it was simple enough to bypass the neutral safety switch and then I could just leave it in Drive all the time. Just had to make sure if parking to park on an incline if I wanted to be able to roll back out of the parking space.
Eventually I cut a hole in the floor and welded a shifter direct to the transmission.
Hah, 68 Camaro here[1]. I had the clutch linkage fail on me once in Miami Beach and managed to drive it all the way home to South Miami w/o the clutch. My recollection was that I had to push start it and managed to time all the traffic lights home so I never came to a full stop.
I can't believe you managed to do that for a month.
914s had an engine and transmission from the VW Bus. Since the VW Bus had a rear engine setup the shift rod was straight into the very front of the transaxle. IIRC, when they reversed the transmission to put the engine in front of the transmission, the shift input eas now in the very rear so the shift rod started in the middle/front of the car, had to transit back, around the engine and transaxle assembly then completely reverse into the what was now the very rear of the transmission. Which is why the 914s were notorious for sloppy transmissions. Later years of 914 made a change in the transmission so the shift rod entered the side of the transmission, which probably helped a little.
A friend of mine still has a Porsche 914, in a barn in Northern California. It hasn't moved in years. Her son, who was really into cars, once wanted to restore it. He's now an design engineer with Toyota and has more old vehicles than he needs, including a 1958 Ford Fairlane Skyliner with the roof that disassembles and stores itself in the trunk.
If someone really wants to buy the old Porsche, send me a message.
My family kind of prides itself on driving manual cars even though you have to go to extra effort to buy them new in the U.S. these days. Once my Dad brought one of them into a mechanic for an oil change and the guy asked 'How do you like your anti-theft device?' My Dad was a bit puzzled because there was no extra alarm or device he could think of, but the mechanic meant the stick shift. Apparently manual cars are now so uncommon that your average car thief doesn't know how to drive one away - so it's kind of a surprising that someone got this 914 as far down the road as he did.
I've seen some guys just pull the fuse out for the ECU/PCM on the vehicle as the anti-theft device. The thief will start to crank and crank but never get it started. It should draw attention to them and they'll just grab what they can and leave.
1970 olds cutlass: Stomp, hold at 15%, crank...then stab repeatedly until it can clear itself out and maintin an idle. Good for -20 to 95 F.
1966 Fleetwood 75 - If it's sat for more than three weeks: Stab to set choke. Crank, pausing every 10 seconds...it's got a LONG way to pump the fuel and you don't want to overheat the starter. Car will then, if driven weekly, start on the first half of the first crank every time. Battery has gone 14 months without a tender or external charge and continues to start the car just fine.
So, apparently there is no mandatory vehicle inspection in the US. Of course there isn't, it would violate the freedom to drive with an unroadworthy car.
It depends on the state. Most of the ones that do exist are concerned with things like “do you have seat belts? are there rear view mirrors? do the turn signals work? is the check engine light on?” Classic/antique vehicles are also often exempt.
The state of Washington is an interesting case. They had annual inspections and then somebody ran the numbers and found that so few cars were being flagged, that it was an enormous waste of resources. They got rid of their inspection requirement.
More programs should be run like that. Set a goal, create a program, then periodically evaluate if the goal is still the same and if the program is effective.
When it comes to bad things that happen on the road mechanical condition is a rounding error compared to things people knew were risky and did anyway. I see no reason we should invest more than a token amount of societal effort chasing the long tail like that.
The fact that you start your comment with "in the US" when anyone even slightly familiar with the place knows that pretty much everything about it is a state by state deal is a massive red flag for a comment that serves no purpose but to convert pearl clutching into internet virtue points. The fact that you end your comment with a back handed quip deriding some imagined notion of freedom more or less confirms it.
[+] [-] blastro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gkoberger|4 years ago|reply
I love when people have such a deep knowledge of something that they can write an essay as unique and thoughtful as this. It reminds me of Kitchen Confidential, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman!, or any rant about British politics by David Mitchell.
[+] [-] cameronh90|4 years ago|reply
Unfortunately the application was so unstable that any attempts to SQLI, or really send any kind of malformed request would simply crash the entire site for hours, presumably until an admin came and restarted the server. DoS wasn't included in the programme so I never won a bounty. I'm sure it could have been exploited, but it was simply so rickety and shoddy that I couldn't figure out how.
Security through instability?
[+] [-] everybodyknows|4 years ago|reply
The engineering Puritan will want to know that the Webers are a retrofit, a hack for escape from the factory's refractory -- but cutting edge tech in the 70s! -- VW electronic fuel injection. The EFI "brain" was a box the size of a small modern laptop, stuffed with individual transistors, inductors, capacitors and resistors.
No one in North America, it seemed, had any idea how to diagnose an internal fault. The owner's options were to buy a secondhand brain taken from a junked car, presumably there for some other reason, or the Webers. Junkyard brains were refundable, but the several hours installing, testing, and possibly uninstalling were not, so careful deliberation was in order.
Access to the brain, like most engine compartment work on the 914, demanded the sort of agility, strength, and determination required of large-animal veterinarians, with access for most tasks from underneath, wedged as it was in a sort of triangular gap below and behind the seats and ahead of the rear trunk and transmission.
[+] [-] winrid|4 years ago|reply
Previous owners could not figure out the issue. The car's engine would rev "bounce" at idle like it had a big cam, but it didn't go away when driving, making driving not very fun. So I got the Scirocco for dirt cheap.
I realized on day that if you opened and closed the hood a couple times, the issue would fix it self, and it was very repeatable.
I realized the computer is mounted next to the hood hinge!
I got lucky and just blindly resoldering all the joints in the computer fixed it.
We later swapped that 400k mile motor setup to a modern turbo motor with a sequential gearbox, and it's a rally car now. :)
(not super important to story but the "ECU" from 1982 was a bit more modern, Jetronic as it was called was "only" roughly the size of a few old TI-82s).
[+] [-] StillBored|4 years ago|reply
https://bowlsby.net/914/Classic/zTN_Man06.pdf
[+] [-] adingus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quadrifoliate|4 years ago|reply
I was confused by this until I searched for "Porsche 914 shift pattern" on Google Images. I guess it's a dog-leg gearbox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-leg_gearbox).
[+] [-] bombcar|4 years ago|reply
HN supports shift pattern unicode!
Ⓡ②⑤
|–|–|
①③④
[+] [-] technofiend|4 years ago|reply
I learned this driving my first car which was a similar vintage Karmann Ghia. It still did it out of habit twenty years later driving my stick-shift Jetta. The second YouTube video I found of someone learning to drive a KG was doing it instinctively as well. [1] I guess there's so much play you just learn to wig-wag a little to see if you're in gear or not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF77y8IVi8k
[+] [-] fosk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] optymizer|4 years ago|reply
One thing I don't see mentioned is that you first have to press down onto the knob, then shift forward, in order to shift the transmission into R. Simply pushing the knob forward won't go from N to R.
[+] [-] schmichael|4 years ago|reply
I am eagerly awaiting the opportunity to stick this into docs or a tutorial someday. What a brilliant line that really captures that thrill of a newcomer to a problem feeling like they've accomplished something only to find the worst is yet to come.
[+] [-] ehnto|4 years ago|reply
I have a quick release wheel to deter the average opportunist from breaking my glass and ignition barrel, and with some wiring trickery and the bits I remove it's never going to start. It's aftermarket enough that stock parts won't help the thief, so unless they have a laptop, an aftermarket ECU, and a tuner handy, they probably won't get far.
Sucks to have to bother with all that, but alarms have never helped me, and you just can't fix woeful 90s physical security.
One attempt on my car was only foiled because when I park up at my girlfriends house, I remove some 90s era fuses you can't get anymore and take the box covers with me. A paperclip would work, but you've got to figure out that the specific fuses are missing first.
It's not about being perfect when it comes to car security, it's about being too much of a pain in the ass, so they'll give up and move on. Just like bicycle security.
[+] [-] mellavora|4 years ago|reply
At some point the solenoid died (or some other electrical component). So to start it, you'd have to reach under the car with a screwdriver (or some other piece of metal, but I kept a screwdriver in the car for this purpose), and short out across two terminals.
You then had 10-20 seconds to get out from under the car, into the driver's seat, and turn the key. As a practiced manouver, it was pretty quick.
[+] [-] legitster|4 years ago|reply
hahaha. This whole time I was thinking "I know the car is lovely, but this is why people love Miatas"
[+] [-] agloeregrets|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sohcahtoa82|4 years ago|reply
Reliable, fun, and economical. The only thing they lack is practicality, being a two-seater with a small trunk. But if you don't have to worry about carrying kids or cargo, they're great cars!
[+] [-] noduerme|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghostpepper|4 years ago|reply
edit: just got to the author’s blurb at the bottom. He was an engineer on the original Miata, so it’s no surprise that he knows what he’s talking about.
[+] [-] agloeregrets|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BayAreaEscapee|4 years ago|reply
I remember one guy who would always show up in a Porsche 914 with racing tires, and he would run circles around us amateurs.
[+] [-] giarc|4 years ago|reply
I knew a guy that was an incredible mountain biker, won all the races he entered etc. He used to show up with crappy bikes probably 10lbs heavier than everyone else... he'd still win. Sometimes you either have it or you don't, and all the equipment in the world won't help you.
[+] [-] jeffbee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Corrado|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dclowd9901|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nes350|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbisson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cameronh90|4 years ago|reply
Does it begin with J and end with Y? (I'm a London-based bean!)
[+] [-] kQq9oHeAz6wLLS|4 years ago|reply
Left my MGB in the dust, of course
[+] [-] rob74|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] technothrasher|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bshep|4 years ago|reply
step 1. prepare a usb with files needed to jailbreak the car and be able to connect to your wifi
step 2. setup a home network with dns/ntp and a reverse engineered tesla server that will authorize the car to work
step 3 set date to reasonable values that the car will accept
step 4 do some button dances to start the car from the usb
…
ill leave the rest to your imagination
[+] [-] kstrauser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bombcar|4 years ago|reply
Eventually I cut a hole in the floor and welded a shifter direct to the transmission.
[+] [-] js2|4 years ago|reply
I can't believe you managed to do that for a month.
1. https://ibb.co/CMW3SdS (I sold it over a decade ago.)
[+] [-] abruzzi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
If someone really wants to buy the old Porsche, send me a message.
[+] [-] acjacobson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] warmwaffles|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fhood|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Damogran6|4 years ago|reply
1966 Fleetwood 75 - If it's sat for more than three weeks: Stab to set choke. Crank, pausing every 10 seconds...it's got a LONG way to pump the fuel and you don't want to overheat the starter. Car will then, if driven weekly, start on the first half of the first crank every time. Battery has gone 14 months without a tender or external charge and continues to start the car just fine.
[+] [-] fabioborellini|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krallja|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] criddell|4 years ago|reply
More programs should be run like that. Set a goal, create a program, then periodically evaluate if the goal is still the same and if the program is effective.
[+] [-] js2|4 years ago|reply
https://www.ncdot.gov/dmv/title-registration/emissions-safet...
There's also an emissions inspection that varies by county, but vehicles older than 20 years are exempt.
https://www.ncdot.gov/dmv/title-registration/emissions-safet...
Does it make any sense to exempt older vehicles that are most likely to fail these inspections? No, of course it doesn't.
New vehicles within the most recent 3 model years are also exempt.
[+] [-] throwaway0a5e|4 years ago|reply
The fact that you start your comment with "in the US" when anyone even slightly familiar with the place knows that pretty much everything about it is a state by state deal is a massive red flag for a comment that serves no purpose but to convert pearl clutching into internet virtue points. The fact that you end your comment with a back handed quip deriding some imagined notion of freedom more or less confirms it.