BUILD-OFF CHALLENGE: MichiganMat Options

[MichiganMat]

Hey er'body, Im MichiganMat from San Jose and Im building a 914.

Backstory:
This summer I had the pleasure of picking up a '75 914 chassis here in San Jose for a mere $300.
It came with with virtually nothing:
no driveline, no interior, no pedals, etc. Stripped, but solid, with minimal overhead and cost.
I've been building 911s for many years now and had an extra set of wheels and 911 front struts in my shed, so I thought hey, lets do this.
My brother and I are just finishing up putting an STi motor into our '67 912 too, so with that project wrapping up Im ready to jump into another.


The Plan:
Well, I got the car for cheap, and I've already got a perfectly good '75 911S to daily/rally/etc with, so the plan is to build a stripped down 914 racer for AX and track fun.
The car will be getting:
- Tangerine Racing rollcage, tied to 8pts, with nascar door-bars
- Rennspeed fiberglass body (fenders f&r, hood, trunk, and both bumpers)
- Mad Dog chassis reinforcement kit and hell-hole repair
- Resto-Design floorpans, seat areas dropped by 2", with custom tunnel
- Tilton pedals
- 5 lug conversion
- 16x7 Fuchs all the way around with 2nd option of 15x7ATE's with canti slicks
- /likely/ wrx drivetrain, but Im exploring my options...


Where sits today:
I picked up the car in May and I've since then I've put it on a home-built rotisserie, cut the pans, tunnel, trunk, headlight buckets, and front fenders out of it, and fixed the hell-hole area.
The pans were totally rotted, the battery tray was nonexistent, the fenders on all 4 corners had damage. Pretty easy to make the decision to start fresh, haha.
Today, most of the chassis kit is installed but I can't finish it until the roll-cage is put in. Tangerine is almost done with the cage so it'll be another week or so until I see it.
In the meantime, the plan is to clean up the wheel-wells, fix the rust in the longs, put in the trunk cross-sections, and primer the reinforcements.
Then I'll get to work on the tunnel, mod'ing the pans, installing the fiberglass, etc.


Anyways, hello, nice to meet you guys, and Im looking forward to the challenge!

[MichiganMat]

Big update: Wiring.

About a month ago I was able to pick up a 2002 wiring harness from eBay. Luck smiled on me back around Thanksgiving and my local junkyard had a 2002 WRX in the lot and I was able to scrounge the complete rear harness, fuel pump controller, turn signal stalk, and a few other various bits for $50. Found an engine fuse panel on eBay and *boom* I've got the complete harness.

~40 hours later and I've finally got the harness all trimmed down and ready for installation.

My advice: Print out the complete wiring diagrams and become extremely familiar with them. Label every connector. Once confirmed what things are, start trimming. EASY. Haha.

Anyways, today I had the day off so I finished up the work on the harness. I've got all the mystery wires identified and marked, all the connectors are trimmed down, and its basically ready to put in the car. Im, of course, going to wire-wrap the whole thing and mount it all to a board before installation, blah blah blah, but the trimming part is done. Phew!

I also had some *spare* time on my hands tonight so I started making the mount for the WRX turn-signal / headlight stalk to mount to the existing 914 steering column. I removed the old controls from the 914 column, including the old tumbler and wheel lock. The mount is made from some 2x2 that I had laying around. Bunch of cutting and bending and I've got a pretty good mount.

The detail work on this stuff will take some time but the bulk is finished. Feeling pretty good about mounting it all in the car next week.

Thanks for following along!