Porsche 911 Engine Research
During my online research on used air-cooled 911s I became familiar with their common trouble spots. This was confirmed when I read numerous used 911 threads on the Pelican Parts forums.
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The story usually went like this: happy guy/gal buys their dream 911, and soon after their purchase, regardless of whether it has 20K miles or 150K miles, they encounter at least one of the common issues and proceed to spiral into panic. It was this initial reading that prepared me to expect the worst and hope for the best. My car’s condition indicated to me that I should lean more towards the “expect the worst” end of the scale.
My other source of familiarity was having read Wayne Dempsey’s How to Rebuild and Modify Porsche 911 Engines 1965-1989 cover to cover a few years earlier.
The book presented a very friendly explanation of how to rebuild the venerable aircooled Porsche flat six engine. Before reading it, I pictured these engines as being impossibly complicated beasts that only a superhuman with unreachable abilities would be able to service. After reading it, the veil of mystery was lifted and I realized that an average Joe (like me) could build one! To be fair, I still believe it takes a superhuman with unreachable abilities (also known as experience) to build one in the standard 40 hours and guarantee that it will run as intended right off the bat. Also I am certain it takes someone with god-like abilities to rebuild them to racing specs and extract that last competitive bit of power while sticking to the rulebook. I will not compare my abilities to those individuals ever and hope I can meet some of them someday and gain some wisdom.
The value of the rebuild book was confirmed, again through the Pelican forums, when many of the same individuals mentioned earlier, took their troubled 911s and successfully dropped, rebuilt, reinstalled, and ran their own engines successfully. Many of these folks seemed like average humans, albeit with a bit of an adventurous streak. After reading each one of these success stories I thought to myself “if they can do it, why can’t I?” So if you are a normal human of average intelligence, with a modest workspace and budget, and lots of time and patience, chances are you too can service these engines and enjoy the glorious noise they make.
In order to supplement the engine rebuild book I bought 3 more books on 911s.
Wayne Dempsey’s 101 Projects For Your Porsche 911 describes individual short projects like replacing brakes, replacing lights, or fixing power window mechanisms. The Bentley Publishers Porsche 911 Service Manual is a condensed version of the Porsche factory repair manuals. I bought this to double check the procedures and specs with some of the other third party books. Bruce Anderson’s Porsche 911 Performance Handbook 1963-1998 is a fascinating deep dive into the development history of the air-cooled 911 engine, including racing versions. It describes how to undertake many common engine and suspension performance modifications. I usually like to have at least 2 difference sources of information on the same topic because seeing the same information printed in 2 or more different books increases my confidence in its accuracy, especially regarding a critical operation. Also there seems to always be a few discrepancies in one source that another one catches.
Armed with these 4 books as well as the gold mine of information at the Pelican Parts forums, I set off on the next chapter of my journey: preparing for the engine drop.