I'm bummed about this but we've got plenty of other cool stuff cooking uh it's it's always tough for me because I want to be authentic and just be really bummed and then people are like how can you you complain you've got 100 te37s and you're whining about your hurt Porsche first world problems I'll tell you what it still sucks this is something that I've been like really excited about it's been literally my obsession as of the past three or four months and like the culminated final product of finally getting to enjoy the car after everything that I've done to it after all the money that I've spent with it it's a really big bummer.

At least I'm thankful I got to enjoy it a little bit at melee Island and got to share it with a lot of people that got to see it there. I'll have it back together I don't know when hopefully in the next two months but uh it's definitely not going to be a focus v36 will be so next thing next time you guys see that car it should hopefully be running doing some Tire spinning making smoke looking cool and uh yeah if you're if you're a keyboard expert I would love to hear what you have to say.

And I'm not being sarcastic maybe there's some ridiculous thing that I've missed or that I haven't uh paid attention to. The thing this is what everyone was saying why the car was running rich and not making power that I needed to blow the fan into the intake now I'm not trying to offend you if you're someone that suggested that it is true that you know obviously when you're driving a little bit of air gets scooped into there but that's not going to resolve what we're seeing on the dyno on the dyno the car should be having Flatline air fuel ratio we don't give a what the power is okay remember that cuz my Dyno reads Low so when you see me put up a car and I make 750 on my Dyno just know your uncle with horsepower Supra.

I'm him up the intention was to end this video here and uh although it would be very YouTuber of me to make a whole another video telling you guys what I found the problem to be I'm just going to put it in here because if you sat through the whole video of me explaining all this dumb Tech talk stuff uh you probably want to know as badly as I did what went wrong. Started taking the plugs out to do leakdown test and when I saw a plug that was completely smashed I figured as much that we either had an event where uh you know I didn't think a rod broke or something happened with a piston because that would be very obscure for it to stay running and that would just not happen so um I boros scoped the Piston sure enough it looks like there was contact with a valve.

So there's a good chance that a valve dropped and that is uh what happened to the engine. The bummer about that it is pretty clear that the Piston looks to be too damaged to be reusable so it's not as simple as just popping some new heads on and let her eat as to what caused a valve to drop I'm not really sure uh usually it's an RPM related thing that would cause valve to drop my current theory is that it had uh weak springs or whatever is supposed to hold the valve closed was maybe weak and that's part of the reason we were seeing that Bri spot because it wasn't uh sealing the cylinder completely and it eventually just gave out there retainers in there I again I don't know I've never taken a part a Porsche engine um but maybe that valve had been leaky and then it just suddenly failed.

Learned my lesson should have done a compression or leakdown test first and that might have given me some more answers where do we go from here I'm not really sure but it is what it is

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is the video that I don't ever want to make don't ever need to make shouldn't have to make don't not excited um I am now 100% confident that the engine on the Porsche is hurt now I know a lot of the uh assumptions that people are going to jump to so I am going to do story time and I'm going to walk you through the past week two weeks of diag that I've been doing with this car to try to figure out one very weird thing that it's been doing that may be related to it now being hurt or have been hurt so if you don't like technical videos and you don't like analyzing din graphs and lots of diagnosis not going to be the video for you but I feel it's important to make because I did have some good findings and I don't want people pointing their finger in the wrong direction all right I do want to preface this with saying that it was not a stock tune on the car I did get a chip that was matched for uh the cams that I put on the car bone stock engine minus the headers and the 993 SS cam this is where it all started I explained in the other video not that I was let down with the power numbers but the shape of this curve is abnormal 964 usually make their Peak power around 5500 and then roll over up top this power band is more like a newer GT3 with Flatline torque and the power keeps climbing the biggest point of concern is this the car was running extremely rich the these things when tuned should be like 125 13 flat this car was rolling down almost to 10 AFR right around where it's supposed to be making Peak power which pointed a massive finger to there being some sort of mechanical issue with the car now Steve Wong who does the chips for these cars was incredibly helpful and sent me a massive email with a list of things to check over he can clean up the tune in order to make this hold the right air fuel ratio but you never want to tune around mechanical problems with a car this I know from lots of other builds and other experiences and when he confirmed my suspicion that there's a problem why it looks like this it's all that I could obsess about and all that I could think about my instinct was that we had a cam timing issue that would explain the power curve that would explain the air fuel however I was told by many people the extremity of how far the air fuel ratio was off and the curve and everything given that we timed the cam and spec something else was majorly wrong so the first place that I went to that is a very common issue around 50 500 RPM there is a resonance flap inside of the intake that opens up it's controlled by vacuum and it's triggered I Believe by you being wide open uh and the ECU sending a signal you can verify it's working by keying on and hearing it open and close uh but it basically changes the way the air and the intake resonates and moves your power band around so just to test to see if mine was acting up or maybe not opening what I did is I did a pull with it manually closed the entire time and then I did a pull with it all the way open so just to show you what happens when it's closed this is compared to stock operation you can see that it rolls over pretty hard up top when it's open you can see that it holds the power up top but it loses the mid-range of not being closed so essentially the stock ECU is able to blend the two of these and that's what this blue line is the combination of both so although that clearly wasn't the issue with mine since the blue line is how the car was running it was pretty cool to see in action how that resonance flap actually makes a difference in the power curve of the car I did something that actually did make the well I didn't make the car better but uh usually when you Dyno a car you use one of these things in the exhaust type in order to get your air fuel data however because of the way that the exhaust is curved I wasn't really feeling like this was giving the best data luckily on my headers there's a little Port right in here so I was able to put the dino wide van Direct directly right past the collector and that did improve the data to a certain amount not perfect but you can see it's still follows the same general Trend with having this low spot but it's still going down as low as like 112 where this is supposed to be holding like 13 flat so the next place I looked which is a pretty common and easy thing is fuel pressure and what's cool about these cars is they actually have a service port on the fuel rail where you can hook up a fuel pressure gauge and then you can basically do a and see what fuel pressure does um I did that I'll put the video over the screen here while I'm talking I wanted them to be able to hear my engine uh fuel pressure appear toal was or PSI higher I think it have been um however again after talking with Steve and other people not enough to explain why my air fuel ratio was so rich and again we're not obsessing and we're not worried about a horsepower number even though this car said it was only making 230 horsepower I know that my Dyno reads very low so it's possible that it was a lot higher I was just worried about the curve I wanted the Curve to be right cuz this is the area where it lives this is the area where it's happy and something was wrong so where do we go next disclaimer throughout this video you're going to hear me often refer to a shop called ep3 Motorsports that is not the correct name of the shop the correct name is ep9 Motorsports so when you hear me say ep3 just know that's the little Honda boy in meing up the name of one of the companies that helped me the most throughout this process I suck in ep9 Motorsports rocks you may notice I had one of these that obviously isn't on the car which is a random thing to have laying around that's because I decided the next place was to change the throttle body now not only did Steve recommend this also ep3 Motorsports which I want to give a massive shout out to they have been incredibly helpful throughout this process they manual swap a lot of Tiptronic cars and there's a few things that I found aren't in the writeups and DIYs online including switching throttle bodies so this throttle body is the automatic one and you'll notice it has a TPS the manual throttle bodies actually just have an idle switch which is this thing right here and then they have a wide open switch which is over here so there's no TPS it's basically idle in the middle or wide open and that's it and that's how the car drives so there's a chance that maybe because I had an automatic throttle body that that was throwing off what was going on so the next step was to switch this and fun fact I don't remember if I've said this in a video before how I got connected with ep3 Motorsports uh I had posted a video or photo of myself Vapor honing my transmission and he was like $100 says that you ruined the transmission and there's media all inside of it so I said bet send him a video boros scoping the inside of it there was no media and I sent him my PayPal he sent me $100 complete random stranger I didn't even know that they were like a Porsche magician shop and uh I thought that was pretty cool and then I like to think we've become friends or maybe uh I'm just an annoying future customer to them hopefully we're friends but uh no they've been super helpful and a lot of the diag and stuff that I've been trying to figure out with this car one other thing that they let me know in addition to this that uh I was trying to put this off cuz this did not look like a fun job it's very crowded up in there to change the throttle body there's two wires that need to be addressed when you do a manual swap um there's basically two coating plugs from the ECU one of them I found and I had the jumper removed already which is good that's how it needs to be and the other one is basically a grounded terminal that will tell the ECU it's a Tiptronic car and it pulls a few degrees of timing uh to help with shifts maybe something to that degree but my car didn't have it in the normal Place lo and behold they helped me figure out uh which paint it was on the ECU it was in fact grounded I cut the wire did another pull and lo and behold it was pretty much the same power same exact curve for all intensive purposes same exact air Fuel Curve this is all like happening with the process of days by the way this is like every day I tried two different things get frustrated give up go back to it haven't been filming everything like the past like 4 days we've been like filming the E36 and you've just been over here on the dyno just dagging this thing just going crazy it's when when I know there's a mechanical issue with something until I can figure it out it drives me nuts this has literally been since the very beginning me with my s13 when I thought it was overheating in the very early days and all turned out to be a bad temp gauge literally my whole first experience of owning my drift car was 6 months of just stressing out what was wrong with my car I think I even rebuilt the whole engine when it was just a bad temp cage yeah cuz I thought it had a bad head gasket so um lo and behold I changed the throttle body expecting to solve all my issues make a bunch more power and it followed almost the exact same curve it did make uh like I don't even know what the like three more horsepower and was a little bit leaner here but interestingly enough I feel like not only did we establish that cutting that wire on the ECU had no effect doing a Tiptronic to manual swap changing the throttle body also had no effect which I was told there's no way that it should even run right with this the dyo said it had no effect maybe it's because there's other issues going on I'm not sure and this was probably the first good finding that I had as I'm doing all this Chang of throttle body I realized I was missing a little piece on my intake and I'll show a photo of what that looks like and for the first time I did something that actually picked up horsepower you'll see up here I gained a little bit of horsepower I think it's just like the equivalent of like not having a velocity stack on like an ITB it just wasn't funneling the air in well but what did it do it made the car even more Rich so it made more power but it made the problem area even worse so at this point I'm pretty much going crazy and uh what's next I put the stock chip back in the ECU just to see if maybe it was a chip issue or something that was happening I don't I don't understand how chips work so with the stock ship back in that's this red line right here it made like 20 less horsepower it was leaner but it still has this General curve that just doesn't look right all these dygraphs air fuel is normally like bone flat right across here mine just has this weird dip and my mind is obsessed that there's something wrong with the car I don't know what it is it is an important thing to note that the fact that the dip is happening right where the engine should be making Peak power tells me that the DME or the ECU knows that the car should be making Peak power there and is giving it the appropriate fuel so for whatever reason either the car isn't getting the appropriate amount of air or the spark is not strong enough and it's being left with uh burned fuel or unburnt fuel so my next place of inspection was the spark and on these engines well I've got them taken apart so that's a little foreshadowing but there's two Distributors with a bunch of wires that go to them so I tested the resistance on every single spark plug wire I also did the test where you run the car on only one distributor and even though I've done this before because it's one of the first things that Steve Wong says to do when you get his chip I must not have caught it running on one distributor there was a slight misfire so I go oh okay maybe there's something here check all the resistance on the spark plug wires all of them checked out but what I realized when I put everything back together the mfire was gone and there was one spark plug that when I unplugged it just didn't feel so great and what I think happened the engine when you're going to plug into the the spark plugs it's not like a straight shot it's kind of like a little angle and I think that the coil pack uh or sorry the spark plug wire was actually resting on the side of the spark plug so I was essentially driving the car with only one of two Sparks firing per cylinder I'm trying really hard not to nerd out too much cuz this is even like Rock of science for me but every cylinder on this car has two spark plugs so you can actually run with just one spark plug but having the second spark plug is the equivalent of advancing timing so if you're down one spark plug you're essentially retarding that cylinder like 7° so with that fixed again we finally had another event where we gained a little bit of horsepower now this is what I'm talking about look at that gain we picked up a whoppin four horsepower and we made 241 horsepower instead of uh our 237 horsepower and on this Dyno that might as well be 500 so probably not but it's more than that um problem though it didn't fix our Rich dip no matter what we did this dip is so still so prevalent here and like this is where it should be going but instead it's going so what is causing that again my brain obsessing over this thinking about it every single night every single thing that I should be focusing on instead I'm focusing on this something is happening where it is not able to burn all the fuel where the car should be making Peak power so I did what um appeared to be easy to do and I took off the Caps to the Distributors and I actually found something now this doesn't look that bad because I already cleaned it but I'm going to put it up on the screen all these contact points were like extra extra gross like there's no way that the car was getting proper spark the way this works this is still like magic to me so I don't fully understand but it's pretty simple when the engine spins this little guy spins here and this is what takes the spark that comes in from the coil pack and goes this cylinder that cylinder this cylinder that cylinder this cylinder that cylinder so if there's a bunch of crud and buildup there that made sense to me that okay at higher RPM when the car should be making Peak power there's stuff interfering with the spark and it's not able to burn the fuel so that was my last effort was to order new distributor caps and new uh they call these rotors um to improve that spark point now there's a belt that connects both of the Distributors those have a tendency to fail or have issues uh I tested mine mine was good there's no free play on any of them so with the change Distributors this is what we found appeared not to make any difference it was following the exact same track the entire time then it started to get rich here and had a little bit of a breakup up I'm going to put that video on the screen right now I think that's where it all went wrong I don't know what it was there was nothing that I did wrong in terms of putting those distributor caps on uh but sure enough I fired it back on I'll play that video too clearly the engine is now misfiring if I had a weak spark plug or weak coil wire or something it wouldn't have gone from having an issue in a pole to then now having a new issue in Idol I knew at this point that something was hurt with the engine hoping that it was a distributor issue I took the Caps off inspected everything the belts were still fine all the contact points were still fine I think we had an unrelated scenario and the engine just finally let go uh the only thing that I can think of that I want to tell myself that makes me feel better better this Rich dip is still driving me nuts I want to say that maybe the whole time I had one cylinder that was uh low in compression maybe it had a hurt ring maybe a cracked ring lend and it just eventually let go like I'm thinking RBS in my head I've had RBS before that run uh usually series one or two rb2s they'll have like a cracked ringland and they'll run they'll have a little bit of blow by and eventually the piston will just explode and it will go bye-bye um maybe that's what happened I want that to be what happened because then I'm not still wondering what causes this Rich spot maybe it is just the cam timing maybe the tune just needed a little bit less fuel there maybe my exhaust has something to do with it I don't know and I was really really wanting to get answers it's a a gift and a curse that I have this tool and then I'm able to see these things because had I not known what was going on with the dyno maybe I would have driven the car and it would have been perfectly fine um although I I'm I'm a pretty firm believer that this was going to happen eventually I just don't know what it is and I really want to know what caused it uh maybe it's something top end maybe it's the cylinders I just really really really am hoping that my crank case is okay on these engines there's like I don't even know enough to like say the proper terms so if you're a Porsche expert especially you Mr ep3 don't judge me you got like the the cam Towers that's what the cams sit in then you got your the next thing down which is the actual things that the cylinders go in and then you've got the crank case where the crank goes in um if it's cylinder or if it's like head related wait is a cylinder head under the cam Tower or is that part of the cam Tower let me look at it real quick I think people call the cylinder heads the thing that has the piston in it I got to look this up cuz I don't want to sound like an idiot idiot I guess they are separate pieces it's so one of it's the cylinder head and the other one's the thing the Piston goes in but they both look the same CU they've got all the air cooled fins on them regardless if it's cylinder head that's best case scenario if it's a cylinder that's slightly worst case scenario if it's the crank case that's the worst thing because that's the black magic Art science that you don't want to pull apart that is very hard to get someone to do um I'm hoping that I can convinced my new friends over at ep3 Motorsports to help me out on an engine rebuild and while if I'm going to say if it's a hurt cylinder it's a really good opportunity to bring this thing up to a 38 um because it's not like a traditional engine block you can do that and actually leave the crank case together you're basically putting bigger bore bigger pistons in it and it'll make a little more power the the spiciness comes from the heads on these things but they get very very expensive we actually have one of the best cylinder head shops for air cools right around the corner from us extreme cylinder head um but a set of cylinder heads for this car I believe retails for like 14 Grand so the odds of us doing that are slim uh honestly the odds of me rebuilding this car in the near future are slim uh part of the reason why I've also been obsessing with this car and why I've been so hands- on with myself obviously the guys have their hands full with getting both e36s ready for competition this year with a very encroaching deadline and I knew that once my season started I was going to be way too distracted I shouldn't say distracted way too focused on the more important stuff to be tinkering with a little side project like this to where I really wanted to finish it so that way the car is done and when I'm home in between all this travel that I'm going to be doing this year I had my little Cruiser to just enjoy go take Colette and the dogs for a little stroll down to the local coffee shop and you know take some cute photos from my Instagram story is as messed up as that sounds like I it's honestly I enjoy that just as much as I enjoy driving cars hard now sometimes it's just like the experience and the vibe of being in it and getting to share that with other people specifically your significant other mine is Colette in this case happy national women's day that's what it's called right I think so I got it right yeah I know it's something to do like that trying to not like I'm smiling but I assure you this is not a fun scenario this is not something I wanted to deal with I wanted to do a 4 L engine in this car eventually but a 4 L engine is like ridiculously big bucks I'm going to be waiting forever and I didn't want to mess with anything in this engine I just want to leave it simple and enjoy the car I don't want it to make big power but now it's like now that it's got an issue I know I got to do something and I guess I should say I have not compression tested the car yet I have not done a leakdown test um I'm going to take it off the dyno I'm going to go do that in the shop how I know for sure that it's down a cylinder obviously the idling sound but I did the uh the oldfashioned unplug both of the coil packs uh you crank it it should sound like as it's cranking but when you're down a cylinder it goes and uh yep that's exactly what it sounded like I don't want to do it again there is a possibility if I had a broken cylinder that that debris has made its way into the crank case it's made its way elsewhere and every single time I crank it is going to cause damage um so a leakdown test would be the next thing to do and that is uh the next place I'll go so I didn't want to make this video I know that this video probably won't get a lot of views and I know that all the nerd talk in it uh probably bored a large chunk of my audience but for those of you that do enjoy numbers like I do like this is honestly one of the most fun things of anything that I do is the fact that we have a Dyno here and I can look at data and I can educate myself I can learn more about a car how things work like it was so cool to see how that residence flap worked and see that that's like a little piece of technology that Porsche implemented way back when and I think still even implements to a certain extent and a lot of the newer GT cars have like variable intake setups um but uh yeah no it sucks I wish I could have just enjoyed the car and before you're like oh you should have just not touched it and left the stock engine I never showed it in video um but it was leaking oil so bad that it was practically a fire hazard when I would stop it would start to smoke all the oil was just dumping onto the factory exhaust and I didn't feel comfortable driving it especially long distances uh the only other thing that I want to address that is a small possibility to have some sort of bearing on this I did take all the injectors out I did clean them I did flow test them however there's a possibility that maybe a stuck injector was causing the rich scenario but I still don't think I don't think this Rich scenario caused the engine problem I don't think the tune caused the engine problem I don't think anything that we did to the engine cause the engine problem but what I do want to know and I am trying to wrap my head around is was there already a pre-existing engine problem that's what was causing the rich spot and that's what eventually let go I don't know I'm probably not going to be one that pulls this engine apart if it is ep3 I'll try to bribe them into taking some video and educating us further I got this car till learn more about air cooled stuff I learned more about air cooled stuff I got an NA car because I knew that turbo cars have a tendency to blow up and na cars like no matter what you do they just keep running you'll never blow one up that's what they told me here we are and it's not a fun place to be I hope you guys are having a good weekend you know and in the end of the day I'm bummed about this but we've got plenty of other cool stuff cooking uh it's it's always tough for me because I want to be authentic and just be really bummed and then people are like how can you you complain you've got 100 te37s and you're whining about your hurt Porsche first world problems I'll tell you what it still sucks this is something that I've been like really excited about it's been literally my obsession as of the past three or four months and like the culminated final product of finally getting to enjoy the car after everything that I've done to it after all the money that I've spent with it it's a really big bummer and at least I'm thankful I got to enjoy it a little bit at melee Island and got to share it with a lot of people that got to see it there I'll have it back together I don't know when hopefully in the next two months but uh it's definitely not going to be a focus v36 will be so next thing next time you guys see that car it should hopefully be running doing some Tire spinning making smoke looking cool and uh yeah if you're if you're a keyboard expert I would love to hear what you have to say and I'm not being sarcastic maybe there's some ridiculous thing that I've missed or that I haven't uh paid attention to oh the the thing this is what everyone was saying why the car was running rich and not making power that I needed to blow the fan into the intake now I'm not trying to offend you if you're someone that suggested that it is true that you know obviously when you're driving a little bit of air gets scooped into there but that's not going to resolve what we're seeing on the dyno on the dyno the car should be having Flatline air fuel ratio we don't give a what the power is okay remember that cuz my Dyno reads Low so when you see me put up a car and I make 750 on my Dyno just know your uncle with horsepower Supra I'm him up the intention was to end this video here and uh although it would be very YouTuber of me to make a whole another video telling you guys what I found the problem to be I'm just going to put it in here because if you sat through the whole video of me explaining all this dumb Tech talk stuff uh you probably want to know as badly as I did what went wrong um started taking the plugs out to do leakdown test and when I saw a plug that was completely smashed I figured as much that we either had an event where uh you know I didn't think a rod broke or something happened with a piston because that would be very obscure for it to stay running and that would just not happen so um I boros scoped the Piston sure enough it looks like there was contact with a valve so there's a good chance that a valve dropped and that is uh what happened to the engine the bummer about that it is pretty clear that the Piston looks to be too damaged to be reusable so it's not as simple as just popping some new heads on and let her eat as to what caused a valve to drop I'm not really sure uh usually it's an RPM related thing that would cause valve to drop my current theory is that it had uh weak see I don't even know enough about the heads so I'm like picturing an SR20 in my head basically the the spring or whatever is supposed to hold the valve closed was maybe weak and that's part of the reason we were seeing that Bri spot because it wasn't uh sealing the cylinder completely and it eventually just gave out there retainers in there and well I'm assuming there's retainers in there I again I don't know I've never taken a part a Porsche engine um but maybe that valve had been leaky and then it just suddenly failed learned my lesson should have done a compression or leakdown test first and that might have given me some more answers where do we go from here I'm not really sure but it is what it isthis is the video that I don't ever want to make don't ever need to make shouldn't have to make don't not excited um I am now 100% confident that the engine on the Porsche is hurt now I know a lot of the uh assumptions that people are going to jump to so I am going to do story time and I'm going to walk you through the past week two weeks of diag that I've been doing with this car to try to figure out one very weird thing that it's been doing that may be related to it now being hurt or have been hurt so if you don't like technical videos and you don't like analyzing din graphs and lots of diagnosis not going to be the video for you but I feel it's important to make because I did have some good findings and I don't want people pointing their finger in the wrong direction all right I do want to preface this with saying that it was not a stock tune on the car I did get a chip that was matched for uh the cams that I put on the car bone stock engine minus the headers and the 993 SS cam this is where it all started I explained in the other video not that I was let down with the power numbers but the shape of this curve is abnormal 964 usually make their Peak power around 5500 and then roll over up top this power band is more like a newer GT3 with Flatline torque and the power keeps climbing the biggest point of concern is this the car was running extremely rich the these things when tuned should be like 125 13 flat this car was rolling down almost to 10 AFR right around where it's supposed to be making Peak power which pointed a massive finger to there being some sort of mechanical issue with the car now Steve Wong who does the chips for these cars was incredibly helpful and sent me a massive email with a list of things to check over he can clean up the tune in order to make this hold the right air fuel ratio but you never want to tune around mechanical problems with a car this I know from lots of other builds and other experiences and when he confirmed my suspicion that there's a problem why it looks like this it's all that I could obsess about and all that I could think about my instinct was that we had a cam timing issue that would explain the power curve that would explain the air fuel however I was told by many people the extremity of how far the air fuel ratio was off and the curve and everything given that we timed the cam and spec something else was majorly wrong so the first place that I went to that is a very common issue around 50 500 RPM there is a resonance flap inside of the intake that opens up it's controlled by vacuum and it's triggered I Believe by you being wide open uh and the ECU sending a signal you can verify it's working by keying on and hearing it open and close uh but it basically changes the way the air and the intake resonates and moves your power band around so just to test to see if mine was acting up or maybe not opening what I did is I did a pull with it manually closed the entire time and then I did a pull with it all the way open so just to show you what happens when it's closed this is compared to stock operation you can see that it rolls over pretty hard up top when it's open you can see that it holds the power up top but it loses the mid-range of not being closed so essentially the stock ECU is able to blend the two of these and that's what this blue line is the combination of both so although that clearly wasn't the issue with mine since the blue line is how the car was running it was pretty cool to see in action how that resonance flap actually makes a difference in the power curve of the car I did something that actually did make the well I didn't make the car better but uh usually when you Dyno a car you use one of these things in the exhaust type in order to get your air fuel data however because of the way that the exhaust is curved I wasn't really feeling like this was giving the best data luckily on my headers there's a little Port right in here so I was able to put the dino wide van Direct directly right past the collector and that did improve the data to a certain amount not perfect but you can see it's still follows the same general Trend with having this low spot but it's still going down as low as like 112 where this is supposed to be holding like 13 flat so the next place I looked which is a pretty common and easy thing is fuel pressure and what's cool about these cars is they actually have a service port on the fuel rail where you can hook up a fuel pressure gauge and then you can basically do a and see what fuel pressure does um I did that I'll put the video over the screen here while I'm talking I wanted them to be able to hear my engine uh fuel pressure appear toal was or PSI higher I think it have been um however again after talking with Steve and other people not enough to explain why my air fuel ratio was so rich and again we're not obsessing and we're not worried about a horsepower number even though this car said it was only making 230 horsepower I know that my Dyno reads very low so it's possible that it was a lot higher I was just worried about the curve I wanted the Curve to be right cuz this is the area where it lives this is the area where it's happy and something was wrong so where do we go next disclaimer throughout this video you're going to hear me often refer to a shop called ep3 Motorsports that is not the correct name of the shop the correct name is ep9 Motorsports so when you hear me say ep3 just know that's the little Honda boy in meing up the name of one of the companies that helped me the most throughout this process I suck in ep9 Motorsports rocks you may notice I had one of these that obviously isn't on the car which is a random thing to have laying around that's because I decided the next place was to change the throttle body now not only did Steve recommend this also ep3 Motorsports which I want to give a massive shout out to they have been incredibly helpful throughout this process they manual swap a lot of Tiptronic cars and there's a few things that I found aren't in the writeups and DIYs online including switching throttle bodies so this throttle body is the automatic one and you'll notice it has a TPS the manual throttle bodies actually just have an idle switch which is this thing right here and then they have a wide open switch which is over here so there's no TPS it's basically idle in the middle or wide open and that's it and that's how the car drives so there's a chance that maybe because I had an automatic throttle body that that was throwing off what was going on so the next step was to switch this and fun fact I don't remember if I've said this in a video before how I got connected with ep3 Motorsports uh I had posted a video or photo of myself Vapor honing my transmission and he was like $100 says that you ruined the transmission and there's media all inside of it so I said bet send him a video boros scoping the inside of it there was no media and I sent him my PayPal he sent me $100 complete random stranger I didn't even know that they were like a Porsche magician shop and uh I thought that was pretty cool and then I like to think we've become friends or maybe uh I'm just an annoying future customer to them hopefully we're friends but uh no they've been super helpful and a lot of the diag and stuff that I've been trying to figure out with this car one other thing that they let me know in addition to this that uh I was trying to put this off cuz this did not look like a fun job it's very crowded up in there to change the throttle body there's two wires that need to be addressed when you do a manual swap um there's basically two coating plugs from the ECU one of them I found and I had the jumper removed already which is good that's how it needs to be and the other one is basically a grounded terminal that will tell the ECU it's a Tiptronic car and it pulls a few degrees of timing uh to help with shifts maybe something to that degree but my car didn't have it in the normal Place lo and behold they helped me figure out uh which paint it was on the ECU it was in fact grounded I cut the wire did another pull and lo and behold it was pretty much the same power same exact curve for all intensive purposes same exact air Fuel Curve this is all like happening with the process of days by the way this is like every day I tried two different things get frustrated give up go back to it haven't been filming everything like the past like 4 days we've been like filming the E36 and you've just been over here on the dyno just dagging this thing just going crazy it's when when I know there's a mechanical issue with something until I can figure it out it drives me nuts this has literally been since the very beginning me with my s13 when I thought it was overheating in the very early days and all turned out to be a bad temp gauge literally my whole first experience of owning my drift car was 6 months of just stressing out what was wrong with my car I think I even rebuilt the whole engine when it was just a bad temp cage yeah cuz I thought it had a bad head gasket so um lo and behold I changed the throttle body expecting to solve all my issues make a bunch more power and it followed almost the exact same curve it did make uh like I don't even know what the like three more horsepower and was a little bit leaner here but interestingly enough I feel like not only did we establish that cutting that wire on the ECU had no effect doing a Tiptronic to manual swap changing the throttle body also had no effect which I was told there's no way that it should even run right with this the dyo said it had no effect maybe it's because there's other issues going on I'm not sure and this was probably the first good finding that I had as I'm doing all this Chang of throttle body I realized I was missing a little piece on my intake and I'll show a photo of what that looks like and for the first time I did something that actually picked up horsepower you'll see up here I gained a little bit of horsepower I think it's just like the equivalent of like not having a velocity stack on like an ITB it just wasn't funneling the air in well but what did it do it made the car even more Rich so it made more power but it made the problem area even worse so at this point I'm pretty much going crazy and uh what's next I put the stock chip back in the ECU just to see if maybe it was a chip issue or something that was happening I don't I don't understand how chips work so with the stock ship back in that's this red line right here it made like 20 less horsepower it was leaner but it still has this General curve that just doesn't look right all these dygraphs air fuel is normally like bone flat right across here mine just has this weird dip and my mind is obsessed that there's something wrong with the car I don't know what it is it is an important thing to note that the fact that the dip is happening right where the engine should be making Peak power tells me that the DME or the ECU knows that the car should be making Peak power there and is giving it the appropriate fuel so for whatever reason either the car isn't getting the appropriate amount of air or the spark is not strong enough and it's being left with uh burned fuel or unburnt fuel so my next place of inspection was the spark and on these engines well I've got them taken apart so that's a little foreshadowing but there's two Distributors with a bunch of wires that go to them so I tested the resistance on every single spark plug wire I also did the test where you run the car on only one distributor and even though I've done this before because it's one of the first things that Steve Wong says to do when you get his chip I must not have caught it running on one distributor there was a slight misfire so I go oh okay maybe there's something here check all the resistance on the spark plug wires all of them checked out but what I realized when I put everything back together the mfire was gone and there was one spark plug that when I unplugged it just didn't feel so great and what I think happened the engine when you're going to plug into the the spark plugs it's not like a straight shot it's kind of like a little angle and I think that the coil pack uh or sorry the spark plug wire was actually resting on the side of the spark plug so I was essentially driving the car with only one of two Sparks firing per cylinder I'm trying really hard not to nerd out too much cuz this is even like Rock of science for me but every cylinder on this car has two spark plugs so you can actually run with just one spark plug but having the second spark plug is the equivalent of advancing timing so if you're down one spark plug you're essentially retarding that cylinder like 7° so with that fixed again we finally had another event where we gained a little bit of horsepower now this is what I'm talking about look at that gain we picked up a whoppin four horsepower and we made 241 horsepower instead of uh our 237 horsepower and on this Dyno that might as well be 500 so probably not but it's more than that um problem though it didn't fix our Rich dip no matter what we did this dip is so still so prevalent here and like this is where it should be going but instead it's going so what is causing that again my brain obsessing over this thinking about it every single night every single thing that I should be focusing on instead I'm focusing on this something is happening where it is not able to burn all the fuel where the car should be making Peak power so I did what um appeared to be easy to do and I took off the Caps to the Distributors and I actually found something now this doesn't look that bad because I already cleaned it but I'm going to put it up on the screen all these contact points were like extra extra gross like there's no way that the car was getting proper spark the way this works this is still like magic to me so I don't fully understand but it's pretty simple when the engine spins this little guy spins here and this is what takes the spark that comes in from the coil pack and goes this cylinder that cylinder this cylinder that cylinder this cylinder that cylinder so if there's a bunch of crud and buildup there that made sense to me that okay at higher RPM when the car should be making Peak power there's stuff interfering with the spark and it's not able to burn the fuel so that was my last effort was to order new distributor caps and new uh they call these rotors um to improve that spark point now there's a belt that connects both of the Distributors those have a tendency to fail or have issues uh I tested mine mine was good there's no free play on any of them so with the change Distributors this is what we found appeared not to make any difference it was following the exact same track the entire time then it started to get rich here and had a little bit of a breakup up I'm going to put that video on the screen right now I think that's where it all went wrong I don't know what it was there was nothing that I did wrong in terms of putting those distributor caps on uh but sure enough I fired it back on I'll play that video too clearly the engine is now misfiring if I had a weak spark plug or weak coil wire or something it wouldn't have gone from having an issue in a pole to then now having a new issue in Idol I knew at this point that something was hurt with the engine hoping that it was a distributor issue I took the Caps off inspected everything the belts were still fine all the contact points were still fine I think we had an unrelated scenario and the engine just finally let go uh the only thing that I can think of that I want to tell myself that makes me feel better better this Rich dip is still driving me nuts I want to say that maybe the whole time I had one cylinder that was uh low in compression maybe it had a hurt ring maybe a cracked ring lend and it just eventually let go like I'm thinking RBS in my head I've had RBS before that run uh usually series one or two rb2s they'll have like a cracked ringland and they'll run they'll have a little bit of blow by and eventually the piston will just explode and it will go bye-bye um maybe that's what happened I want that to be what happened because then I'm not still wondering what causes this Rich spot maybe it is just the cam timing maybe the tune just needed a little bit less fuel there maybe my exhaust has something to do with it I don't know and I was really really wanting to get answers it's a a gift and a curse that I have this tool and then I'm able to see these things because had I not known what was going on with the dyno maybe I would have driven the car and it would have been perfectly fine um although I I'm I'm a pretty firm believer that this was going to happen eventually I just don't know what it is and I really want to know what caused it uh maybe it's something top end maybe it's the cylinders I just really really really am hoping that my crank case is okay on these engines there's like I don't even know enough to like say the proper terms so if you're a Porsche expert especially you Mr ep3 don't judge me you got like the the cam Towers that's what the cams sit in then you got your the next thing down which is the actual things that the cylinders go in and then you've got the crank case where the crank goes in um if it's cylinder or if it's like head related wait is a cylinder head under the cam Tower or is that part of the cam Tower let me look at it real quick I think people call the cylinder heads the thing that has the piston in it I got to look this up cuz I don't want to sound like an idiot idiot I guess they are separate pieces it's so one of it's the cylinder head and the other one's the thing the Piston goes in but they both look the same CU they've got all the air cooled fins on them regardless if it's cylinder head that's best case scenario if it's a cylinder that's slightly worst case scenario if it's the crank case that's the worst thing because that's the black magic Art science that you don't want to pull apart that is very hard to get someone to do um I'm hoping that I can convinced my new friends over at ep3 Motorsports to help me out on an engine rebuild and while if I'm going to say if it's a hurt cylinder it's a really good opportunity to bring this thing up to a 38 um because it's not like a traditional engine block you can do that and actually leave the crank case together you're basically putting bigger bore bigger pistons in it and it'll make a little more power the the spiciness comes from the heads on these things but they get very very expensive we actually have one of the best cylinder head shops for air cools right around the corner from us extreme cylinder head um but a set of cylinder heads for this car I believe retails for like 14 Grand so the odds of us doing that are slim uh honestly the odds of me rebuilding this car in the near future are slim uh part of the reason why I've also been obsessing with this car and why I've been so hands- on with myself obviously the guys have their hands full with getting both e36s ready for competition this year with a very encroaching deadline and I knew that once my season started I was going to be way too distracted I shouldn't say distracted way too focused on the more important stuff to be tinkering with a little side project like this to where I really wanted to finish it so that way the car is done and when I'm home in between all this travel that I'm going to be doing this year I had my little Cruiser to just enjoy go take Colette and the dogs for a little stroll down to the local coffee shop and you know take some cute photos from my Instagram story is as messed up as that sounds like I it's honestly I enjoy that just as much as I enjoy driving cars hard now sometimes it's just like the experience and the vibe of being in it and getting to share that with other people specifically your significant other mine is Colette in this case happy national women's day that's what it's called right I think so I got it right yeah I know it's something to do like that trying to not like I'm smiling but I assure you this is not a fun scenario this is not something I wanted to deal with I wanted to do a 4 L engine in this car eventually but a 4 L engine is like ridiculously big bucks I'm going to be waiting forever and I didn't want to mess with anything in this engine I just want to leave it simple and enjoy the car I don't want it to make big power but now it's like now that it's got an issue I know I got to do something and I guess I should say I have not compression tested the car yet I have not done a leakdown test um I'm going to take it off the dyno I'm going to go do that in the shop how I know for sure that it's down a cylinder obviously the idling sound but I did the uh the oldfashioned unplug both of the coil packs uh you crank it it should sound like as it's cranking but when you're down a cylinder it goes and uh yep that's exactly what it sounded like I don't want to do it again there is a possibility if I had a broken cylinder that that debris has made its way into the crank case it's made its way elsewhere and every single time I crank it is going to cause damage um so a leakdown test would be the next thing to do and that is uh the next place I'll go so I didn't want to make this video I know that this video probably won't get a lot of views and I know that all the nerd talk in it uh probably bored a large chunk of my audience but for those of you that do enjoy numbers like I do like this is honestly one of the most fun things of anything that I do is the fact that we have a Dyno here and I can look at data and I can educate myself I can learn more about a car how things work like it was so cool to see how that residence flap worked and see that that's like a little piece of technology that Porsche implemented way back when and I think still even implements to a certain extent and a lot of the newer GT cars have like variable intake setups um but uh yeah no it sucks I wish I could have just enjoyed the car and before you're like oh you should have just not touched it and left the stock engine I never showed it in video um but it was leaking oil so bad that it was practically a fire hazard when I would stop it would start to smoke all the oil was just dumping onto the factory exhaust and I didn't feel comfortable driving it especially long distances uh the only other thing that I want to address that is a small possibility to have some sort of bearing on this I did take all the injectors out I did clean them I did flow test them however there's a possibility that maybe a stuck injector was causing the rich scenario but I still don't think I don't think this Rich scenario caused the engine problem I don't think the tune caused the engine problem I don't think anything that we did to the engine cause the engine problem but what I do want to know and I am trying to wrap my head around is was there already a pre-existing engine problem that's what was causing the rich spot and that's what eventually let go I don't know I'm probably not going to be one that pulls this engine apart if it is ep3 I'll try to bribe them into taking some video and educating us further I got this car till learn more about air cooled stuff I learned more about air cooled stuff I got an NA car because I knew that turbo cars have a tendency to blow up and na cars like no matter what you do they just keep running you'll never blow one up that's what they told me here we are and it's not a fun place to be I hope you guys are having a good weekend you know and in the end of the day I'm bummed about this but we've got plenty of other cool stuff cooking uh it's it's always tough for me because I want to be authentic and just be really bummed and then people are like how can you you complain you've got 100 te37s and you're whining about your hurt Porsche first world problems I'll tell you what it still sucks this is something that I've been like really excited about it's been literally my obsession as of the past three or four months and like the culminated final product of finally getting to enjoy the car after everything that I've done to it after all the money that I've spent with it it's a really big bummer and at least I'm thankful I got to enjoy it a little bit at melee Island and got to share it with a lot of people that got to see it there I'll have it back together I don't know when hopefully in the next two months but uh it's definitely not going to be a focus v36 will be so next thing next time you guys see that car it should hopefully be running doing some Tire spinning making smoke looking cool and uh yeah if you're if you're a keyboard expert I would love to hear what you have to say and I'm not being sarcastic maybe there's some ridiculous thing that I've missed or that I haven't uh paid attention to oh the the thing this is what everyone was saying why the car was running rich and not making power that I needed to blow the fan into the intake now I'm not trying to offend you if you're someone that suggested that it is true that you know obviously when you're driving a little bit of air gets scooped into there but that's not going to resolve what we're seeing on the dyno on the dyno the car should be having Flatline air fuel ratio we don't give a what the power is okay remember that cuz my Dyno reads Low so when you see me put up a car and I make 750 on my Dyno just know your uncle with horsepower Supra I'm him up the intention was to end this video here and uh although it would be very YouTuber of me to make a whole another video telling you guys what I found the problem to be I'm just going to put it in here because if you sat through the whole video of me explaining all this dumb Tech talk stuff uh you probably want to know as badly as I did what went wrong um started taking the plugs out to do leakdown test and when I saw a plug that was completely smashed I figured as much that we either had an event where uh you know I didn't think a rod broke or something happened with a piston because that would be very obscure for it to stay running and that would just not happen so um I boros scoped the Piston sure enough it looks like there was contact with a valve so there's a good chance that a valve dropped and that is uh what happened to the engine the bummer about that it is pretty clear that the Piston looks to be too damaged to be reusable so it's not as simple as just popping some new heads on and let her eat as to what caused a valve to drop I'm not really sure uh usually it's an RPM related thing that would cause valve to drop my current theory is that it had uh weak see I don't even know enough about the heads so I'm like picturing an SR20 in my head basically the the spring or whatever is supposed to hold the valve closed was maybe weak and that's part of the reason we were seeing that Bri spot because it wasn't uh sealing the cylinder completely and it eventually just gave out there retainers in there and well I'm assuming there's retainers in there I again I don't know I've never taken a part a Porsche engine um but maybe that valve had been leaky and then it just suddenly failed learned my lesson should have done a compression or leakdown test first and that might have given me some more answers where do we go from here I'm not really sure but it is what it is\n"