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A few things to know before stealing my 914

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Re: A few things to know before stealing my 914

#341

Post by aetherspawn »

distortedsignal wrote: post #153
EastSmith wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the electric conversion still a thing? I want an eclectic car with no monitors, no software updates, no surveillance (none of the new electric car offers that - they are calling home for updates and god knows why way too often, and they have bigger monitors than my 14" work laptop).

Ford will sell you an electric crate engine for $4k [1]. At that point, I think it's up to you to supply the other parts of the system. I assume that at this point there are enough wrecks of Model S/X/3/Y that you should be able to pick up electric motors from them at junkyards. The thing I really worry about with electric swaps is battery. You could have a Note 7 situation on your hands _real easy_ if you're not car…

Inverter not included .. useless

Re: A few things to know before stealing my 914

#343

Post by sethammons »

mellavora wrote: post #10

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…

I left my key in. Pop and sparks and a running engine immediately (gmc s-15)

Re: A few things to know before stealing my 914

#344

Post by denimboy »

lastofthemojito wrote: post #84
linksnapzz wrote: post #43

Oh this is lovely. As someone who has spent time inside a Karmann-Ghia convertible, I can smell the burning oil now....

Smell is the thing that gets me a lot of the time with classic cars too. I appreciate the design from another era - mechanical simplicity from when folks weren't concerned about maximizing efficiency, thin window frames and door pillars that would fare embarrassingly in a modern crash test, etc. Sure, it doesn't fit the standards of today, but that's why these older cars are so different - they're literally from a di…

> Smell is the thing that gets me a lot of the time with classic cars too.

I had a 1972 Triumph Bonneville which had a "tickler" button on each carb instead of a choke. That meant to start it up you would press each tickler button until a bit of gas shot out invariably on your hand but also the engine and the sometimes hot exhaust. Only after this ritual was performed could you jump on the kickstart (no electric start). So you end up smelling like gas.

Q: Why to the British drink warm beer? A: Because Lucas makes electrics.

Re: A few things to know before stealing my 914

#345

Post by hinkley »

remram wrote: post #328
cameronh90 wrote: post #63

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…

I feel like there's an analogue to the CAP theorem for code, where you can have an un-exploitable application if you don't need it to keep running in the presence of unusual requests. Secure, Available, Unattended, choose any 2? You can have a secure&available app but you need to keep patching it. You can have an available&unattended app but it won't be secure. Or you can have a secure&unattended app, it will just ne…

Available and Unattended are the same thing. The third value is 'Cheap'.

You want unattended servers? Fine. You want someone not to be able to steal the keys from a backup? We can do that too. You want the servers to be able to restart at 2 am without getting someone out of bed to come type a passphrase into a console on each server?

HSMs were quite expensive. People made any number of attempts to make them cheap and found out why they aren't (Ari Shamir has entered the chat), often a Too Good to be True scenario.

Re: A few things to know before stealing my 914

#346

Post by hinkley »

fosk wrote: post #210
quadrifoliate wrote: post #24

> 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 g…

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.

> since you can more easily shift between 2nd and 3rd gear in a quicker way

That is in part a secondary effect of how wide and crisp the offsets are between gears (how 'deep' the H shape is). On the gear boxes people tend to like, going from 2nd to 3rd, and 3rd to 4th take very close to the same time. On my little roadster I'd just stomp on the clutch and throw the gear knob in the general vicinity of where it needed to be, relying on hand-eye coordination and the synchros to do the real work (I missed maybe 3 shifts a year, and half of those when I was tired).

Compare this to the car I learned stick on - the infamous Chevy Citation, made during the nadir of Detroit - where the gearbox was roughly shaped like an X, although at the time it felt like an l. I lost track of how many times I accidentally upshifted instead of downshifted at a stop sign, and that engine had less torque than an electric pencil sharpener, so the engine would simple stall the moment I tried to let the clutch out.

The roadster I subsequently drove, I experimented and found that if I was even a little careful I could get moving from a dead stop in 3rd gear. Basically a modified tractor engine. All torque, no horsepower.

Re: A few things to know before stealing my 914

#347

Post by donw »

colburnmh wrote: post #317
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father had one of these just sort of gathering dust in the garage when I was growing up, utterly shocked when I turned 16 and he handed me the keys. I still like to casually drop "oh yeah, I used to have a Porsche back when I was 16." Although I must say it was in immeasurably better shape than this one :D I still dream of finding an old 914 and giving it an electric conversion… I'd have to do something about that…

It's really a weird Volkswagen/Porsche frankenstein, despite what the badge says. Porsche designed it, Volkswagen built it. Outside the US, the Volkswagon version is 914/4, and the Porsche version being a 914/6. (The last digit references the number of cylinders). In the US market both versions were branded as Porsche because US buyers were deemed unable to understand that two different car brands used the same body…

The author has neglected to mention that you can find the engine by shouting "Gerald! Gerald!" at the top of your lungs in all directions.

This will summon the ancient, exhausted hamster that powers the vehicle.

Re: A few things to know before stealing my 914

#348

Post by shakezula »

Havoc wrote: post #319

Fine writing. Frankly I'm more intrigued by the fact that this seems to have gotten an easy #1 spot on hn. Writing about sketchy clutches on old cars does not generally attract wide hn acclaim. I'd love to hear opinions as to what made the difference...clearly something here is different.

It’s funny you say that cause this screams HN content to me.

I’m a long-time project car builder and this post strikes all the chords of a labor of love.

Clever content, technical concepts but written in plain english, relishing in the almost hostile user experiences that some engineering can produce. It smacks of everything HN is to me.

Re: A few things to know before stealing my 914

#349

Post by jiggawatts »

cameronh90 wrote: post #63

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…

I once took out the internal telephony network of a large bank's head office through simply scanning the network for devices. They weren't tracking IP addresses (or anything) in any form of database or even a spreadsheet, and I was tasked with finding and updating every device on a particular network. I used nmap and simply did a subnet scan to find anything that would respond on common ports.

It all went down in a heap and I felt very guilty for a few minutes until I realised that this infrastructure was so fantastically unstable that a TCP half-open (just a SYN packet!) could kill it stone dead. That's not my fault.

You can't blame the postman if knocking on the front door demolishes your building.

Re: A few things to know before stealing my 914

#350

Post by chrisdhoover »

tricky wrote: post #104
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father had one of these just sort of gathering dust in the garage when I was growing up, utterly shocked when I turned 16 and he handed me the keys. I still like to casually drop "oh yeah, I used to have a Porsche back when I was 16." Although I must say it was in immeasurably better shape than this one :D I still dream of finding an old 914 and giving it an electric conversion… I'd have to do something about that…

Hello to a fellow member of the "my first car was a Porsche" club. Mine was a $400 924 that broke at least once a week. Good times.

I have a 65/66 912 converted to a 2.7 liter six. I love this car.

When I got it there were issues. I have worked through many of them. The PO did not understand the regulator for instance. I gutted the wiring and redid it. It now charges and there is no battery drain.

Like OP the lights were not good. I replaced those with LEDs. The suspension was worn, it was completely replaced.

The engine has good compression and the leak down showed it was healthy. It did leak oil though, sealed the engine. It no longer leaks.

You can’t just buy one of these cars and drive it. You have to wrench on it. It takes care and feeding.

I find it rewarding

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