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I've made a bit of progress this week. On Tuesday I took the interior to a local trimmers for a quote. I'm going to have the seats and door panels retrimmed in grey leather to match the grey carpet set and headliner that I already have. The seats will be trimmed to look basically stock, with perforated centre panels and pleated backs. I'm also having the seats slighty 'sculpted' so that they give a bit better support and hold you in place better for those track days. :)

I sorted out all the remaining trim that I needed to take to the chromers to have either chromed or polished. I managed to straighten the roof gutter trim and the trim that sits below the rear quarterlight, hopefully they come out alright at the polishers. The other trim I took down was the front and rear screen trim and all of the trim from the door panels and door cappings.

I also raised the front suspesnsion back up a couple of notches. This is partly due to the fact that I have now fitted larger tyres to the front and needed extra clearance and partly due to the decision to keep the VW front spindles (more about that in a minute). Originally I was going to convert the 944 front spindles that I have by making a bolt on adaptor to 'create' the top balljoint mounting (the 944 uses a McPherson strut setup). Now I have decided to fit the Porsche hubs to the VW spindles and either buy or make some adaptors to mount the 944 calipers with. MBT engineering can supply these as a machined casting but they would probably only work with their own converted hubs.

The first step in converting the front spindles to take the Porsche hubs is to make some bearing adaptors. Once the hubs are fitted I can then measure the difference between the mounting points of the VW caliper and the Porsche caliper, this will allow me to make the caliper adaptors.

The only problem with fitting the Porsche hub to the VW spindle is that it increases the track slightly (I took a rough measurement of about 15mm / side) hence part of the reason for raising the suspension back up.

With the front suspension raised back up I now have some suspension travel back (which is good) but even though the sill sits pretty much level to the ground (the front is about 3/4" lower than the rear) the stance of the car doesn't look right (which is not so good). To counteract this I'm going to raise the rear up slightly, this will also give me increased clearance under the engine for the headers (which is excellent as it was previously too low) and restore the 'raked' appearance

Raising the car up is obviously changing it's appearance considerably, I must admit I prefer the look of a lowered Type 34, with the rear tyres just tucked up in the arches and the front tyres about level. The car now has about 1 1/2" gap between the front wheel and arch and will have about the same at the rear when I'm finished with the rear suspension, but it should hopefully be a lot more driveable, and in doing this I've saved a heap of work as I now dont need to narrow the suspension to get the tyres inside the arches.

There is another thing that scares me a little - I wouldn't have considered raising the suspension back up a few years back - Maybe, just maybe.... this is a sign of old age.