I had a longer post written but I lost it by accident, so here's take 2.
One thing that bothered me about the car was its pretty new white license plate. It just didn't match.
As of July 1, 2009, Californians can put the original color of plates back on the car if they have an unregistered front and rear set, and pay a small fee. My friend just happened to have a set, and he gave them to me for my car.
I found a more suitable license plate frame on Ebay for $35. It looked too busy for the back so I put it on the front.
I used my cheap art kit's paints to carefully retouch the plate. I wanted it to look old still, but the numbers and black were a little rusty and it was a mess.
Perhaps most amazing was that I was able to scratch back the year stickers until I found the original pink 1968 sticker. It's weird, the other stickers broke away easily but the 68 was fine. I carefully cleaned it up and even though it'll be recovered once my month/year stickers are here.
Finally, I put a $5 chrome frame on the rear plate:
The brakes were starting to make lots of noise, and one side had been pulling for weeks. I bought replacement calipers with pads for $50. Removing old calipers:
The rears seemed fine. Fronts were well ready.
I like how you can change the pads in seconds if you want to. But since I was replacing the calipers, too it's a bit bigger job.
This is not how a brake pad is supposed to look:
The new calipers were much nicer and cleaner. The rotor had a little wear, but they were pretty good still and we saw no need to replace.
Then we bled the fronts, and threw the wheels back on.
We left the shop and agreed to meet about 15 miles south at a restaurant for lunch. Since my 912 has one seat still, I drove solo. I was scared of the freeway, since I had only taken the car on it once and that was over a month ago. It had been sitting since then with a few new parts. But I figured it'd be okay. I merged onto the freeway at 70 and about 2 miles later the car started losing speed, it seemed really down on power. I noticed it was getting worse, so I pulled over.
A highway patrol officer was out back before I was out of the car. Amazing. He was really young and asked if everything was okay, to which I replied and told him my friend was coming. He didn't want to stick around so he told me to sit in the seat with the lapbelt on until my friend arrived.
A couple minutes later after baking in 80+ without a moving car or AC, I popped the back. I couldn't find anything immediately wrong. The fuel looked a little low in the filter, but it was clean. Still, the low fuel seemed to be an indication that somewhere from the gas tank to the fuel pump, we had a problem. Maybe the fuel pump itself, but it's hard to say this soon.
The car wouldn't idle very well, but I was able to bring it back to the shop without trouble. I think some loose crap from the tank has dislodged finally and I should probably replace both filters from just a few months ago, as sediment made its way from the tank. I guess I should really clean that up next.
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