It’s been a few years since I have had a Porsche 911 in the stable. It seemed like the right time since were down to only two 
sports cars in addition to the daily drivers. I think five cars is the bare minimum these days. “It’s only a problem if you want to stop but can’t.” I don’t want to. There are some less free spirited individuals in the house who have expressed differing opinions.
It’s a 1979 911 SC. It’s the new Apex Ridge test bed. She’s going to get mauled with testing stress, dissected like a frog in a high school biology class and experimented on like a lab rat. If you have been listening to my podcast “Speaking of Reliability” you have already heard about some of the plans for this thing.
The experiments and investigations are going to fall in the following three categories.
- Combining technology from different eras to create an optimum design. The principal here is to investigate why some designs last for decades and others are improved/changed in more regular intervals. I don’t mean entire products. I am talking about specific features and components in projects. For example, the electric motor in your vacuum is more or less the exact same design as the electric motor in your grandmother’s vacuum from 50 years ago. The exterior materials of the vacuum are dramatically different. Your grandparents vacuum had a metal case with peripheral plastic components. I haven’t seen a vacuum in modern day with any exterior metal components.
Use Case 7: Yup we are going to stress this thing and use it in ways it should not be. Don’t know what Use Case 7 is? click here. I want to see what will happen when this thing is out of it’s comfort zone. I’m not just talking high speed and race track maneuvers, that is it’s comfort zone. I’m talking about putting a trailer hitch on it and seeing how much weight it can pull safely at highway speeds. That’s Use Case 7!- Primary wear-out failure modes. It’s an interesting opportunity to have a product that has an extreme amount of calendar time on it but not an extreme amount of use. This is a 40 year old car with 80,000 miles on it. We will go through and investigate many of the different wear-out failure modes and see if they can offer any insight into what makes a good wear-out strategy.
This what the old girl looks like today.
She has already made friends with other kids in the neighborhood. I kinda freaked her out when she sat and watched me rip the heart out of one of her new buddies this past Saturday.
For those of you who have been following some of my other shenanigans this blue 911 (with it’s heart ripped out) is the one that a few friends and I stole and rebuild for a buddy in need (What I mean by in need is he crashed his 911 and wasn’t going to get around to fix it anytime soon). Here is the story in video form on my friends youtube channel if you want to check it out.
-Adam
PS. Look for story soon on when she meet a Tesla Model S. The cars swapped drivers and we did a breakdown of the dramatically different technology approaches to transportation. Raw machine vs. rolling computer
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