Tying Up Loose Ends

Today was a day to get rid of cruft left over from the conversion process so far. I took all the extra, un-used 914 parts lying around the house out to Craig at Camp914 in exchange for a fusebox cover for under my dash. I also returned his 12-point CV joint tool that I used to take the transmission out of the car. I sent an e-mail to Pat to return his flywheel lock tool and clutch centering tool. All the cardboard boxes from the motor, controller and several other ElectroAuto shipments are in the recycle bin.

There are few things left to finish for hooking up the transmission to the chassis:


The instructions suggest adding tie-wraps to keep the clutch and speedo cable from flying around (shown here in red before trimming).


I had originally failed to get the correct length of bolts to connect the black ElectroAuto motor mount to the original horizontal engine mount bar. The correct bolts are now properly sitting in the two recessed holes in the orginal engine mount bar. I also tightened down the four primary nuts to hold the black motor mount to the motor itself. Everything should be snug now.

Note: the original ElectroAuto instructions call for 3 1/2" bolts for the original engine mount. I found that 2 1/2" bolts were far better. I wonder if this was a typo in the directions or if there are different motor mounts on the various 914 model years.


In the process of cutting the hole in the trunk for the motor controller, I had to cut the grounding bolt away. There wasn't anyplace near enough to install a new bolt, so I simply used one of the bolts that holds the controller mount plate in.

Since the bolt head is inside the trunk and the nylock nut is under the car, I had to use a wrench and two steel blocks (pictured above) to hold the bolt in place while I worked with the nut below.


Here's the grounding strap in place under the nut. Note that I scraped the metal under the grounding strap as clean as I could get to provide a reasonable contact. Since we don't have to pull high numbers of amps from the chassis ground anymore (say, to the starter motor), I'm hoping this will be adequate to ground the transmission and electric motor housing.