I bought a 2002 Porsche 996 back in March, 2021. Grabbed a friend, headed down to Orange County for a weekend road-trip to pick it up and drive it back. I haven't post...uh...anything about it here which is honestly kind of a mistake on part. The experience of owning a higher-mileage Porsche has been interesting.
The Zero isn't finished but it's good enough to drive. I've got it registered and road legal. I've put a couple of hundred miles under the wheels. I think I'm in a place where I can ruminate on The Experience.
The experience of driving a Seven style roadster is not for everyone. It's not an experience that I crave every single day. It is an experience that I do enjoy. When I want to have that experience, my GBS Zero delivers.
Experiences--and the quality of them--are subjective. What I write here is entirely personal to me. Your experience of a Seven will almost certainly be completely different.
When you're in the Zero--as with almost all Seven style roadsters--you're exposed. (We're not going to talk about the Donkervoort here, yet.) You're sitting in a tub barely big enough for two average sized adults a few inches above the ground. You've got not roof. You've got no doors. You can touch the freeway with your fingers while belted in without really straining. You might have a windscreen. You feel everything. You hear everything. You smell everything. If shit goes seriously pear-shaped you're probably going to die.
It's kind of like riding a motorcycle in that regard. You get real aware of how small you are compared to everybody else on the road. You drive with your head a swivel. You work to keep extra space around you. In traffic you have to drive it like nobody will see you. On a busy freeway, it's fucking stressful and exhausting.
That's not where you should be driving any Seven if you can avoid it. Freeways are misery. Unfortunately freeways are often the sucky gateway to the good stuff; the experiences that bring smiles.
Present In The World
Much like a motorcycle, when you're driving a Seven you're not moving through the environment, you're moving in the environment. If you don't understand this distinction, the next paragraph will mean nothing to you.
You feel it all. You hear it all. You smell it all. As you dive in and out of shadows cast across the road you feel the air get colder, denser, and wetter. When you crest out onto a stretch of open road under the sun you feel immediately feel the warmth and lightness of life. The sensations you feel driving a Seven are directly influenced by environment you're driving in. That's an exhilarating feel. This is one of the experience that the the Zero has given me.
Joy
This car is happiness.
This car makes happy when I drive it, regardless of my mood.
This car makes other people happy when they see it.
TL:DR - Bought a set of Sena Tufftalk-01 earmuffs like I should have from the start.
Got the lab results back from Blackstone and...uh...well...This will be fun.
With about one year and 600 miles on the engine since installation. (~46K miles on the engine in total)
In the universal averages column you'll find how this type of Ford usually looks in analysis after about 7,200 miles of oil use. Those averages include a lot of engines that just see daily street driving. We're thinking this engine, used in a GBS Zero, is probably going to develop a different wear pattern, possibly with more metal as the norm. We'll be interested to see how trends build. As it stands, metals are higher than average overall, but if they improve or at least stabilize, we wouldn't worry. Silicon may show dirt, unless recent repairs could mean it's sealer.
Since I've got a few miles under the car and the fill plug was leaking, I decided to drop and replace the fluid in the diff.
The fluid came out looking none too worse for wear as you'd expect with only 600 miles on the car. Just the normal sorts of things you'd see.
The leaking occured because I'd over-filled the differential and reused a single-use-only sealing washer. When I filled the diff, I had the rear of the car on jackstands while the front was on the ground. The rake of the car allowed the diff to take more fluid than it should have, the level of fluid when the car was on the ground was above the fill plug. Between that and the expired sealing washer, it leaked.
Refilled the diff with the car level on QuickJacks this time, replaced the collapsing sealing washer with a fresh M20 copper crush washer and torqued the fill plug to spec.
Fluids:
It's been about a one year and ~600 miles since I first drove my Zero on public roads. It's time to lift it up on the QuickJack, pull the wheels and look around for issues. There were surprisingly few.
This is the state of progress since my March check-in.
It's a bit spammy so it's behind the jump...
Over the weekend I went on a British car rally. Some 350 miles, about 1/3rd of it bombing backroads in Napa and Sonoma. It's a great shakedown cruise for the Zero.
I'll let the video do the talking for the remainder if this post.
Chatting with a friend, he mentioned that he didn't think the low pressure pump that GBS provided with his kit would sufficient. That got me thinking about my own car and whether or not my fuel pump would be sufficient for supplying my 2.5L engine.
Time for Maths.
This weekend I blitzed through a fun little side project to join inexpensive Bluetooth motorcycle headset/intercom systems into compact, folding hearing protective ear defenders.
I was inspired by a few DIY builds using inexpensive motorcycle intercom headsets. (And even Cardo Systems' own PackTalk headset.)
Materials:
The results are pretty great, to be honest. The sound quality is way better than I'd hoped for. Paired up to my phone they work extremely well, the controls are easy to use, and the they're reasonably easy to pair up. At $75 a pop, I'm not going to get too bent out of shape if somebody boosts them out of my car when I'm not looking.
As a bonus, the don't look much more janky than the Cardo solution.
I won't go into a full tutorial, other have done so already so I'll just link to one of them here:
It's been a minute since I've updated here. I have no interest in writing detailed accounting of the last six months on the project. The TLDR is the car's registered and plated, I've been doing shakedown drives.
