Internals

The Porsche went under the knife this weekend. Thanks to a good friend with a lift, the aforementioned Dr. Knoll, we were able to make some headway. You'll recall that ever since the last round of the HPDE at Brainerd (the one that ended with a broken fuel rail and fortunately no fire) the oil pressure guage was flickering... and it kept getting worse. After the local service guy put a new alternator on, it pretty much went to zero... no oil. As mentioned before, the mechanic checked some things, and decided that the engine was shot and that the best thing to do was to pack it in and get a new engine... figure 30 hours of labor plus the cost of a new engine... ouch. The mechanic was thinking that the thing to do was to fix the oil starvation first, and then address the vibration.

After a bit of work to get a -real- 944 off the lift and out of the way, and the fabrication of an ingenious 4x4 rig to hold the engine in place (plans for which were found on the internet), we got the 944 up on the lift. It turns out that by removing the suspension cross member, and, uh, yes, the A-arms, you can drop everything enough to remove the oil pan and expose the bottom of the engine.

The first thing to check was the oil pickup tube. Ironically, we'd hoped that it was broken, but it wasn't. That would have been an easy fix. The baffle in the oil sump was broken, however, which showed that the engine was shaking around a LOT, and that the pickup tube had hit it and broken it, supporting the excess vibration theories. With this taken this off, it looks like:


Given the oil starvation, we needed to figure out what condition the shaft and cylinders were in. We pulled the Rod Bearings and replaced them, and it turned out that the shaft was in very good condition. None of the bearings were spun, and none of them were too bad off. the sides of the cylinders that we could see were fine. Good news.

While brainstorming possible reasons for oil starvation, Brent hypothesised that a bad sending unit could have created a false negative. In checking the sending unit that was on the car, I discovered that one of the wires was not connected to the sending unit. It was inside the little rubber boot, but not connected, so in some instances, it might have gotten a signal, but if the engine moved around any, it would clearly disconnect.

Yeah.... you'd think a trained mechanic would have checked that.

So, and order has been placed for a new oil sump insert, and the wire has been reconnected. We'll see what happens next.

Possible Solutions to 944 problems...
Vibration - Balance Shaft adjustment
Oil Starvation - Connect the damn wire.