[david c.]

Hi guys,

After months of suspension and exhaust work, I finally thought my 912E was ready to go. As usual, I was wrong.

The car is a 76 912E (you know, 2.0 flat four just like a 2.0 914).
My car has points, a Permatune, 40mm Webers, Bosch coil, 050 distributor (new last year, along with the points, rotor, etc.) The cap and wires are about two years old. I installed brand new spark plugs last night, after gapping them to the specificied plug gap (should it be altered from stock if the car no longer has FI?)

Here's the problem. The car runs, but rough. The cylinders on the driver's side are doing all the work. The cylinders on the pass side are not combusting as much, I can feel a dramatic difference in the exhaust temp of the two cylinder banks at the tailpipe (my exhaust is completely split with no crossover).

With the car running, I can disconnect either, or both, of the spark plug wires running to the suspect cylinder bank. There is no audible change in the engine note.

I cannot do the same, of course, with the good side.

But, I do know that I have spark. I can get spark to jump at the plug end of the wires-visibly.

Now, I did check the plugs first, before I replaced them with brand new ones. They were clean on the good side and caked with black soot (not oily at all) on the bad side.

Also, I disconnected the cross bar on the carb linkage. With the car idling, I opened the throttle on the bad bank. It did have an effect, but not as much as the same movement on the good side.

My thoughts are these: I'm looking for a big problem, but it's probably a bunch of small problems.

I'm thinking part of the problem is spark. I swapped in one old ignition wire to one of the bad cylinders, and it sounded better and the exhaust got hot.

Although that is good news, the problem is that I couldn't really smell a lot of unburnt gas in the exhaust before I tried swapping the wires. I would have thought that if the problem was spark, I would be smelling a lot of unburnt gas in the exhaust from the bad side.

Does anyone have any ideas? I really want to participate in an autocross held both days this weekend. Im willing to work all night on the sucker, so fire away with your suggetions.

Thanks guys, I really appreciate any thoughts!

David