When I bought the car from the US it came with a list of bills showing a comprehensive rebuild with RSR cams and JE pistons & bores. All the right bits seemed to have been replaced and checked according to the receipts. This had been one of the key things to check when the car was inspected in the US and the 'inspector' had indicated that the engine was good and ran well (but you already know how reliable he was!). In terms of what I bought it probably represented 1/2 of the value package and the key assumption was that the engine would not need any work.
From the moment the car was removed from the shipping container near Liverpool and it wouldn't start things only went down hill.
Before stripping the car for modification it was sent to a local rolling road to test the engine to see if it would reveal anything.
The report wasn't good. When they did get it to run under load on the rollers it was dishing out a lot of smoke with some obvious dips in the torque curve as well as being distinctly under power for a 2.2RSR cam'd high compression engine. I think it peaked about 170bhp but was running like a dog.
So the engine was removed before anything else and sent to a guy I had used reliably for several years on other classic cars including Mini's, Alpines, TR's, Westfields, etc.
For whatever reason he decided to let me down big style and kept promising to start work on the engine 'next week', but 5 month later it was still sitting on the same pallet it was delivered on with no sign of any change. This particular business had got a contract to support a well financed Mitsubishi EVO rally team with a father putting up loads of money and the son demolishing the cars at the wknds ! Suddenly all their other long standing customers became 2nd priority. Regrettably I had to collect the engine/box and took it to another Porsche specialist.
Picture below shows engine out of the car and ready to go to be fixed (the first time)
On stripping the engine they found that the pistons although recently replaced were scored on the skirts. Turns out it had 2.2/2.4T cast iron bores with new JE forged pistons. Also to our surprise it turned out to be a 2.4/2.7 crank making it a 2.4 engine rather than a 2.2 as described when it was sold !! The bores had hardly been affected by the pick up but the pistons showed scoring down the side skirts. You might have expected to find metal pick up in the oil but there was no evidence of this which was strange. In truth we never really got to the bottom of the reason for the pick up. The pistons could probably have been cleaned up, but without knowing the route cause and considering the cost of putting it all back to together then I was persuaded by the engine builder to start from scratch with new Mahle pistons and bores. So I bought a new set from DART auto in the US. It also got new rockers, S cams to replace the RSR ones, new fan cowling, Turbo valve covers, etc. etc.
Picture below shows shiny new pistons with Weltmeister collapsible oil tubes
Picture below shows rebuilt engine before being put back in the car.
Picture showing modified Turbo cam covers with some fins reduced so they can be removed whilst in the 914/6 engine bay without dropping the engine.
The newly rebuilt engine was put back into the car before going back to the engine builders rolling road for set up early in 2008.
The result was an engine performance no better then before apart from the lack of smoke. Then started several months fault finding, investigation and rolling road time to determine the problem. The suspicion fell onto the MFI system early on. Although I had a recent full rebuild receipt we sent the pump away to be re-calibrated (again). Unfortunately it wasn't packaged properly by the guy who sent it and it was damaged in transit requiring some repairs and new parts but it came back with the calibration checked and was re-fitted. Result - just the same as before. The Porsche specialist was stumped and eventually ran out of ideas about why it wouldn't run properly but they were convinced it wasn't the engine and must be a problem with the MFI injection.
By now I was getting desperate and the bills were getting ridiculous with the engine still running like a pig and I refused to keep throwing money at the problem with no result. I had entered the Classic Marathon in June 2008 and so after some advice from a couple of other Porsche specialists I decided the only thing I could do to guarantee getting a running car in the time available was to bolt on some new PMOs in place of the MFI system.
A quick call to John Parr at PMO and I managed to jump the queue for a small premium and get a set on order. It was a simple job to fit them and get them running, but something still wasn't right. In fact the car felt almost identical to what it had been like with the MFI system ! Off to a different rolling road and after hours more on the rollers and yet another huge bill it came back just like it was before with the power and torque curves to prove it. They had tried everything on the carbs but all they managed to do was move the torque peaks up or down a little on the rev range.
See below power/torque curve as engine was received from the US with the MFI system in Apr 2007 (smoking and poor compression on 1 or 2 cylinders at this time)
See below power/torque curve after engine completely rebuilt with PMOs fitted in May 2008 (It looked much the same with the MFI system fitted after the engine rebuild). The light and bold lines are just the start and finish curves before and after the same PMO carb set up session.
So there I was -
- I had the engine '
professionally' inspected in the US and claimed to be good
' Had engine completely rebuilt in the UK after found to smoke and low compression on 2 cylinders.
- Loads of rolling road time and replaced/re-calibrated lots of the MFI system
- Then bought and fitted PMOs
- Loads more rolling road time and carb set up work
- Result - 12 months of work, plennty of 'experts' involved, nearly £10k spent and all I had to show for it was an engine which ran little than the day I received it from the US.
By now I was fairly convinced that it was a problem with the engine as both the new PMOs and the MFI system performed exactly the same.
The engine builder was still adamant that there wasn't a problem with the mechanicals of the engine and had eliminated this option early in the fault investigation process.
It was now only a couple of weeks before the Classic Marathon and I set to loose everything I'd spent to enter if I couldn't get the car ready in time. I took the car to Mike Bainbridge who helped me late into the evening to check the engine over. Mike found a couple of minor faults but crucially he found that the timing was out on both cams by a small amount, so he reset it and bolted it back together. It wasn't out by much but the transformation was amazing when I drove it down the road on the first test run. It wasn't perfect but the obvious flat spots had all gone and because the last rolling road sesion had messed about with the carbs jetting so much trying to get them to run better with the incorrect valve timing, they were presumably now not ideally set up for the correct valve timing.
I'd spent a small fortune and 14 mths of heart ache and it all came down to incorrect valve timing which was eliminated as an option right at the start of the investigation process because the engine builder could not acknowledge they could make a mistake.
Mike recommended Lamb's Garage rolling road near Chesterfield, so a trip there and yet another session on the rollers saw the carbs reset to run with the correct valve timing giving just over 200bhp and 160lbft torque. The car was all ready to go with a week to spare before the Marathon !!
Mike had noticed a couple of other minor issues with the engine build but they could wait until the off season at the end of 2008 to get sorted.
More of that later.
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. Loving all of it, but particularly the engine grill and cover.
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