I'm having so much fun with the new toy. It makes me feel like a new person. Along with working on the car I've managed to work on quite a few things around the house that I've been putting off. I guess this is a good thing.

Yesterday I took it downtown to Pantels Music Box. Mark Pantel and I belong to the same flying club. He's a real upstanding club member and I felt it would be in good hands while he had it.

It didn't take him long to pull the old alarm out, clean up the old wiring harness, and install a state of the art Viper Auto Security system. The best thing about this is, I could remove my temporary hot wires and use the ignition key as it was originally intended.

This morning I took it over to the tire store and got replacements for the aging tires that were on it. Turns out the old tires really were old, 20+ years to be exact! The rear tires remained the same size but the fronts went down to 205 50 15. This had the desired effect of lowering the front end 2.5".

The car sits level now. What do you think, are the fronts too small?

I finally got a weekend off work and time to dig into the car. Well I'm glad that I took fellow 917 owner Tony's advice and had the Laser towed home instead of driving it. I can see where the previous owner had such a hard time with it. The alarm system that's installed has fully disabled the ignition. The boneheads that tried to start it went so far as to cut the large positive battery cable that goes back into the wiring harness. I ended up disconnecting all the wiring that went to the engine and ran a few temporary wires of my own from the battery to where they're needed on the engine. Made my own temporary wiring harness for now.

It had no gas in the tank so a gallon of gas was added and the I made a tin foil funnel to fill the float bowl on the carburetor. Pushing the throttle a few times to prime it and hitting the new starter button she fired right up. She purred like a kitten, sounded really quiet too! I shut it down right away and pulled the rocker covers to set the valve lash.

After that was done I left the valve covers off and re-fired the engine. Just wanted to check to see if oil was reaching the top end and it was. Snapped the valve covers back on and brought it down off of the jacks. One tire needed a bit of air so the compressor got some use as well.

Now was the time I was waiting for, the maiden voyage so to speak. Kathy had heard it running and had come out and cleaned the windows for the test ride. It needed that much more than I could...Continue Reading

I've wanted a Laser 917 ever since seeing an ad for one in a magazine in the early 70's. I must have been 14 or 15 and it may have been Hot Rod Mag or Popular Mechanics, I really can't remember.

Anyway, I'd just about forgotten about it until a few yrs ago someone posted a picture of one online and the "bug" bit into me again. I've been keeping my eyes peeled ever since then and found one nearby through a friend of a friend recently.

Here are a few pics of my new car.