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Jesse's 945 Turbo

Shift Knob

Here's my little shift knob side project. I spent a lot of time trying to pick out a shift knob that I liked. Ultimately I chose the Momo Targa shift knob. Unfortunately they're $200 so I decided to instead make my own using it as inspiration.

Glued together some scraps of wood. Burly maple, oak and walnut.
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My dad has a little wood lathe but it was buried in a corner of the garage so I opted to instead go for a flappy wheel on an angle grinder and went to work carving it down. It was actually pretty fun sculpting it down. Had so much fin, that I didn't take any carving progress pics of course.

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Because I carved it with an angle grinder, it's not the most symmetrical. Overall though I am very happy with how it turned out. Feels really nice in my hand.
 
Back to the meat and potatoes.

At this point the gas in the car was nearly 2 years old and I figured it was likely contributing to my lack of a running engine. That was all syphoned out and fresh gas was put in.

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Got a shift boot from a Miata. It ended up working great as a retrofit with some additional holes added. You can also see the neutral safety switch wires soldered and heat shrinked above. I plan on adding a hidden switch into the loop to add some extra theft deterrent.
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Now on to actually testing the car
First test of the trans
https://imgur.com/eOErP79

Frist Drive!
https://imgur.com/ijCQOSR

I had some trouble at first getting the car to go into reverse, that ended up being because the clutch wasn't completely bleed. It fixed itself after a little use.

After this I did many small trips around the neighborhood, and doing a quick check over the car after each one until I was sure nothing was wrong

Once I had gained some trust I went on a little longer of a drive to the gas station
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It's now been a few weeks, I've put around 100kms on the car with no real issues other than a small coolant leak from a hose clamp that wasn't tight enough.

The trans also sounds like its making bit of contact with the tunnel. When I've got the motivation, I'll get in there and do some clearancing with a hammer. For now I am just going to continue driving the car until I take if off the road for the winter. The new turbo is a 16t, a little bigger than the 13c that it replaced. It also spools it whole lot earlier and more linearly, making the car much more modern feeling with less of the punchiness.


Safe to say I wont be needing this junk anymore
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My current fleet
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thessejway said:
Mine are Nearly as cool as yours though. Can't imagine how fun that c30 must be with AWD
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Having the AWD was mainly because I have the larger K16 turbo/Hilton stage III tune - with just FWD I had way too much wheelspin off the line. It is more fun to drive in the winter with AWD though, for sure.

Are you going to deal with those broken head studs at some point? I doubt the bracket you have will hold up over time.
 
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lookforjoe said:
Having the AWD was mainly because I have the larger K16 turbo/Hilton stage III tune - with just FWD I had way too much wheelspin off the line. It is more fun to drive in the winter with AWD though, for sure.

Are you going to deal with those broken head studs at some point? I doubt the bracket you have will hold up over time.
Click to expand...

There ya go. further proving my point

Yeah I will deal with the exhaust studs properly. I really just wanted to drive the car, and prove that the trans swap worked. It had been over a year off the road and I couldn't wait to drive it anymore.

The plan is to either buy a cheap used head and have it sorted by a machine shop to swap onto the car in the spring. Or to remove the current head now and have that same work done over the winter.
 
This car never ceases to remind me that it is old and tired. driving home from work on Thursday, I got a huge plume of sweet smelling smoke out my back end. The first thought that hit my head? Head gasket! But as I sat there at a red light, white smoke billowing out of either side of my hood, waiting for it to turn green. I noticed the engine was running just fine. When I was able to pull over I did a quick check around the engine bay, but couldn't tell where it had come from.
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Because I couldn't easily find the culprit on the spot. A tow was ordered
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Got home and pretty quickly found problem. Heater hose had burst pretty dramatically
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New parts have been ordered, I'm just glad it was an easy fix

Oh and I got my reverse light working with my homemade little wiring harness
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very nice project ! I have a broken stud on my manifold I too did not extract successfully , but like you want to drive the car more than work on it, so will have to pull a head from the JY at some point and get it prepped to be swapped on .

Alas If I do it again, heads coming off and out of the car !

Thanks for the build thread and the shifter looks great !
 
Quick little update. It took some extra time getting the car back on the road. Shipping for the new hose took about a week. Then as I was about to complete installing it, the plastic end of the heater valve broke clean off. It had finally succumbed to the years of thermal abuse and the plastic had began to go brittle. A few more days of waiting and a replacement was acquired. Followed then by a few more days of not having the time to complete the 15 minute repair.

When I finally got around to it, I also managed to fix a couple other things that had been neglected. The throttle body wasn't quite adjusted properly since the trans swap causing the car to idle and run just a little off. Got it dialed in and the car has been running better than ever.

The speedometer had started to go a little weird and bouncy a couple years ago. It kinda worked so I never bothered putting in the time to sort it. Recently it went completely dead. So I went looking for the problem. Needless to say it didn't take long to figure it out
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There must have been a fuel leak at some point that completely degraded the insulation. This also happened while attempting to remove it for repair
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Didn't want to spend more time and money dealing with new parts so I busted out the soldering kit and heat shrink. I sure this is absolutely not the best way to go about this.

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But hey, it worked

Back in business
 
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