Quote:
Originally Posted by roofbolter
A friend of mine is looking to buy a used, 84, low mileage 930. He said that it smokes for for a few seconds at start-up, (the car does not get run very often), is this a problem. Also wanted to know what the typical know problems would have been with this model.
thanks
90 C4
|
With a 930, a small puff of blue/gray smoke from pooled oil in the turbo that collects overnight and then clears within a few (2-3) seconds at fast-idle as the (separate) turbo scavenge pump does its job is of no concern whatsoever. Mine does it most days.
Only minimal development went on for the most part; 78-88 turbo cars are almost identical, just slight changes year-to-year and more emissions junk/options. 89 on cars have the 5-speed, and the 90-91 have the 964 body style with the same 3.3 motor, different suspension and brakes.
A weak spot is the rod bolts, which can stretch and let go. The 3.2 motor shares the same crank/rods/bolts and can suffer from the same issue (aftermarket rod bolts are the fix for this). But you can't miss this issue when buying the car - it sounds like someone hitting the crankcase with a tire iron at engine speed. Don't ask me how I know.
Regular oil changes with high-quality oil (service records can tell a good story here), are extremely important as the turbo housing can get red hot and the motor shares the same oil as gets pumped through those bearings. Good fueling and ignition are absolutely critical for turbo cars.
PPI. Find a shop that works on a lot of 930's, especially if anything is modified. They resemble 911's, but there's a lot of additional complexity.
It's worth mentioning that, as a MY '84 car, this is certainly a RoW (Rest of World) vehicle as these weren't imported into the US between 80-86. So a big concern would be - how was this Federalized to meet US emissions?
It may have been a grey import and never federalized. Which means it will make more power. Much worse, it may not have been done correctly or completely.
Depending on your state and what was (or was not) done, this could cause issues with smog or registering - especially if the paperwork was mislaid. You might want to look into that, many threads here on the topics.