Sometimes you just can't win...and sometimes you can!

Well, I managed to get some of the drive dilute problems on the Porsche figured out. Since there are a number of areas that appear to have original parts I am assuming that very little has been done to this car in terms of maintenance.
Since I was expecting some spark plug tubes to show up soon I thought I would go sink in the garage and get the car on stands, etc.
I decided that I should probably take the throttle body off and make sure it is clean. It is fairly straight forward to get everything off with minimal intrusion into anything complex.
I took the ICV, or AIC, servo off the TB and sure enough: caked with some nasty sooty stuff. I liberally applied much carb cleaner and let it sit a few minutes, then plugged the servo into the wiring and turned the ignition on. No reaction.
This is a good thing! Either the servo is shot completely, or it needs more cleaning.
So more carb cleaner, and more poking and scraping with a tiny screwdriver. Then another plugin session with no results. Now I acknowledge that it may likely be shot, so no harm in using a little manual adjustment: plug it in, power it up, and proceed to whack it on the top of the power steering pump that is conveniently siting there: Pop! Buzzzzz.
Working ICV! Great success!
A shot of WD for good measure and I bolted everything back in. Fired the beast up and, miracle of miracles, it now idles down to about 900 RPM!

Good Porsche writeup

Of course, being the new owner of a Porsche Carrera2, and a self-titled wrench head, I find reading about other peoples mods and experiences to be very helpful. (assuming of course that their writeups are worth reading!)

http://www.renntrack.com/forums/showthread.php?474-Porsche-996-C2-to-GT3-Mods-Project

This is a series of posts about one shops conversion of a 99 C2 to a more track-worthy car. I like the first couple of pages so far so i thought I would share!

Budget is tight for me right now, so i will likely not be doing much past maintenance in the near future, so hold tight! :)
-Gabe

Interviews suck

Well, I have my interview at Polaris Ind in a couple hours. Tomorrow I have my I yer ire at Phillips n Temro. My nerves are fricking shot. Can't sleep, but the upside is that I am so strung out that I do t notice how badly my back aches. *sigh*
I need a vacation already!

More smoke

Well I didn't get much progress today. After a long day of driving and interviews I didn't want to do much of anything. I thought perhaps working on this contraption would settle my mind a bit.
So I busted out the duct tape to try to mitigate some of the smoke leakage and figure out why the thing belches smoke everywhere but the hose port.
I got mixed results and then thought I would go back rot the hot iron model for a while. Sadly when I hit the lid with a drill bit it decided to fling the can of warm baby oil all o er the bench. I had had enough. So little positive progress, and now I have a mess to clean up and a prototype to rebuild. *sigh*

Smoke machine 2 mid process

A mid process picture. If you get this far you should probably enjoy a cold beer while the JB hardens

Smoke machine #2

Okay, starting on concept 2 tonight. I got some last minute inspiration from a rather brief you tube video here.
The beauty of this concept is having a fan on the unit means you don't need shop air to keep the smoke flowing!

Porsche 3.4L spark plug tube o-rings

So, as with all things designed by an engineer and then added to a marketing organization called "product support" things that should have been simple become very complex.
Take the Porsche M96 engine in my new porsche carrera. It has six spark plug tubes (later the design was thankfully changed to not have this feature!).
These tubes are sealed and held in place by a captured o-ring on each end. You can buy many combinations of the tube and o-rings from various sources. As somebody with an engineering background I saw the asking price for these o-rings and immediately recognized that the Porsche brand was again inflating prices.

Large spark plug tube Oring

When the parts catalog is examined it gives the following spec: 27.94x5.33

a quick consultation with a google search results in AS568 as a specification for o-ring sizes, and -320 as the size meeting those dimensions.

Now to amazon to discover that rather than pay $7 for one oring i can, in fact, get 10 o-rings for less than $7!
Or further goggling and you can discover that over at oringwarehouse.com, where they have a $5 minimum I have to buy 25 of these beauties!

incredible.

Small o-ring
parts catalog spec: 25.07 X 2.62this spec = AS568-120Similar to the above o-ring, this one costs about 10 cents. even in soft high temp silicon.:)

Out with the old, in with the new!

Turns out after 60,000 miles spark plugs look pretty sooted. Fine besides that though!

Meyle comes through again!

Now I don't have any proof that the Meyle HD parts I've put on the rally bimmer are any better, but they sure do look the part!