Making the Old 914 Look Like New Underneath

STORY and PHOTOS BY

DARRYL DEPPE, Pacific Northwest PCA Region

CONTRIBUTED BY DENNIS ROOD

Last month’s article left off with disassembling the rear suspension and diving into stripping the undercoating and paint off the rear underside of my 914 since all the parts for reassembly had arrived. It all started out so simple, my objective was to just remove the rubberized undercoating and old factory seam sealer, prospect for rust and do the cosmetic work I couldn’t do 30 years ago because of a lack of time and working on jack stands.

At first, I was just going to just refresh the black rubberized undercoating applied by the body shop with fresh Wurth High Build Under seal. After inspiration from some detailed period photos of 914s on the Karmann assembly line and others of the underside of pristine survivor 914s on Bring-a-Trailer, the urge to make the underside look like how it would have come from the factory if painted red took hold.

I had to keep reminding myself that the mission here was to get the car ready for a new engine and start breaking it in as soon as I could get it in the car. The wheel alignment was perfect so I wanted to avoid removing the rear trailing arms if the bushings looked good and avoid having to do an expensive 4-wheel alignment. There was also that huge risk of opening a can of worms by removing the brackets from the rear suspension console and breaking off the bolts or captive nuts which is a common theme I read about online. I did want to swap out the sketchy 5-bolt Fuchs conversion drilled 4-bolt rear wheel hubs that were the only choice 30 years ago and replace them with a recently developed, properly reinforced 5-lug hubs which would also require installing new rear wheel bearings. That opened the opportunity to do a thorough strip to bare metal and repaint of the naked rear trailing arms while still mounted on the car. I also wanted to upgrade the rear springs from the base model 1.8-liter 8.5 mm thick / 80 lb. spring rate to the sport 2.0-liter 11 mm thick / 100 lb. spring rate ones which I had sitting in my used parts stash from a junk yard harvest years ago. Installing new Bilstein shocks front and rear were another one of my goals. Lastly was installing a set of factory option front and rear sway bars, the combination of all the upgrades will totally change the handling of the car. Combined with the torque and horsepower upgrades I’m having Jack Morris make to the engine should really make a nimble and fun to drive 914.

Stripping undercoating and paint off the bottom of a car is about as dirty and unglamorous of a task as I could imagine. I called it “working in a coal mine” because at the end of each day I emerged from the underside of the car looking like those old photographs of 19th century Welsh coal miners. The first step was to thoroughly clean everything with mineral spirits using a pneumatic siphon spray wand and a variety of soft bristle brushes. Even with my best efforts to catch the runoff with tarps and catch basins on the floor, both me and the shop floor was a total mess. The mineral spirits did a great job of making the rubberized undercoating brittle so it could be easily scraped or wire brushed off exposing the Marathon Blue Metallic paint that originally came on the car. Removing the paint was done with Aircraft Paint Stripper and wire brush wheels on my electric drill and Dremel tool. I also welded in the new rear sway bar mounts at that time since the mounting points were prepped for welding in the process.

Once everything was stripped down to bare metal, the new paint started with an ample coat of SEM Self-Etching Primer. After allowing the primer to cure for a couple days I scuffed the surfaces with 320-grit Scotch-Brite pads and wiped everything down with a wax & grease remover solvent. The trailing arms were masked off and painted with rattle can Dupli-Color High Temperature Engine Enamel in

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a semi-gloss black as original and allowed to cure for several days. Once the semi-gloss black components had cured and hardened, I carefully masked them off and painted the remaining underside of the car in a low VOC single-stage enamel that had been mixed to match the Mazda Sunrise Red paint code by my buddy who owns a body shop. It pays to build relationships with people who do this stuff professionally, not only for good advice but also access to the latest products I’m not aware of and can’t get from my over-the-counter or internet sources. I used a favorite small siphon touch-up paint gun (called a “jab gun” in the industry) after my buddy thinned and filtered the paint so all I had to do was pour it from a plastic jug into my paint gun. My shop ceiling fan provided a good down draft, yet I did get a little over spray on my shop floor beyond the tarps I had laid down, luckily, I had covered everything important with plastic drop cloths.

I was worried that my progress was stalled waiting for a new vapor honing cabinet I ordered in early November before I could start restoring the suspension parts for reassembly. Like some kind of just-in-time miracle, the new cabinet showed up, I set it up and immediately put it to use stripping the rust and paint off the brake and suspension parts. Vapor honing is pretty amazing, it has all the good benefits of glass bead blasting but without the dust and since the glass beads are cushioned by a water slurry, they don’t disintegrate and last for months. I started with aggressive 80-grit glass beads and was quite amazed at how the vapor honed parts emerged from the cabinet looking almost polished. That will be great on aluminum or magnesium parts that don’t get painted, but on these steel parts, further surface prep was required so paint would stick. I gave all the surfaces a good scuffing with a fine wire brush wheel on my drill press before painting. I used the same Dupli-Color engine enamel on the black parts and Eastwood’s Golden Cad 3-step paint system to simulate cadmium plating on the wheel bearing retainers and tow loop.

Reassembly with new and restored parts is the pay-off for all those dirty “coal mine” hours and I had it ready for wheels and back on the ground in a couple days. Now the bridge jack that held up the rear of the car from the engine mount pods has been slid away and I have access to the lower engine compartment ahead of them. I’ve just finished with the stripping the front bulkhead and engine mount pods to bare metal and should have it all painted within a few days. Then it’s time to install the rear sway bar and all the new brake lines, parking brake cables, transaxle and motor mounts before rotating the car on the 4-post lift and repeating the restoration process with the front end. Jack Morris informed me that he’s running into supply chain issues on some of the parts for the engine rebuild so I’m actually feeling less stress about being done with my part on time.

Looks like spring might be optimistic at this point but breaking in a new engine is an excellent way to spend the warm and dry summer months!

Editor’s Note: Thank you Darryl for sharing your 914 restoration.