I had no idea there were 4-cam 8's.

I have been mesmerized about the 4-cams for years. I can't believe that there are still quite a few people/companies that still know how to rebuild them! Thank God (and thank Fuhrman!)

*subscribed* Great commentary as usual Grady!

Grady is the only one one who "got" the Forbidden Planet reference... I hope that there really is a motor out there and that it winds up in hands which can appreciate its Werner von Braun (or maybe Rube Goldberg) complexity...

I'm getting very excited about this thread...

Maybe the thread of the year... Or decade!

More pictures please please please... :)

Has anyone written a DYI on this? ;-)

It sounds like about 8 hours work for a pro! :eek:

According to Dean Batchelor's Buyer's Guide (quoting Fuhrmann, page 60, 2nd edition):

"These first four-cam engines took a skilled man 120 hours to assemble a complete engine, and the timing alone could take eight hours -- sometimes fifteen if tolerances weren't just right."

More like 40-60 hours if you have a lot of experience, new cam drive bearings and all the shims.
Then there is the 20-30 to finally assemble the engine, re-checking everything.
That is on top of a normal rebuild and valve job.

Best,
Grady

I'm feeling very humble right now... (in a good way) ;)

How many Abarth GTs were produced? How many were brought to the US?

All healthy and realistic skepticism aside, just wrap your head around the potentially long odds of some one ending up with an Abarth GT engine and not know what it is, especially in the sates, and especially in Colorado (so close to Grady and he doesn't know about it)....

If this is true, I feel sorry for you Uber, you should have bought PowerBall lottery tickets and with your luck you would have won! Rather than burn it up on a 100k Porsche engine!!

The only way this could get better is if Uber really needs the money for some heart wrenching personal reason, and lucking into this motor changes his life.

If Uber doesn't contact Grady directly/privately with all the information that has been asked in the next day or so - understandable to be vague as to not get barraged by hacks, just like lottery winners - then I say it was a fun ride, but alas another hoax.

-Jack

Damn all that work for 135Hp?! A 1960 Ferrari 250 had about 275. But that's a V12 for ya.

Jack,

It may very well turn out that I do know the engine. Forty years ago, I probably knew them
all. At least I may have raced against it. It is even possible I owned it at one time. I think
I owned 38 but it may have been into the 40s. Unfortunately I don’t have records.

Clearly it isn’t just ‘out of an Abarth Carrera’ as it is configured for mid-engine as in a
Spyder. The Abarth Carreras were all rear-engine cars, built on 356B(T5) Porsche chassis.

Of course it is possibly out of an Abarth originally, although there were more 692/3A
engines (50+) than there were Abarth Carreras (20).

From what I can see, uber’s pictures and posts says it has some serious updates.
Those Weber 46IDAs were ’64 904 and the spacers were ’65 904 ‘improvements’.
I’ll bet it has an interesting history. It certainly has had a long one.

Once we get more information, I’ll email Jurgen Barth and see if he can pester someone
at the Factory to trace the engine from that direction.

Best,
Grady

An email address for Jurgen Barth!!! :eek: Does he check it daily?

Care to share?... ;) haha

"Does he check it daily?"

Certainally not for MY emails.
I do owe him some 904 numbers.

Best,
Grady

Grady, I just have to say you are the best.

Kirk

A good case has been made that wherever that motor is today, forty-five years ago it was in a 904 Carrera GTS. As for Barth, I've met him; we have mutual friends. He opens e-mail from knowledgable people like Mr. Clay who are keeping the flame alive.

Grady,

Are the flywheels on the ends of the cams simply to balance cam rotation or do they drive any ancillary components? If I understand correctly, the early engines ran the distributors off the ends of the cams?

The early engines drove the distributors on the ends of the cams but they found there was too much vibration there which was messing up ignition timing. That is why they switched to the V drive off the crankshaft. This vibration (torsional, I believe) was found to be excessive for proper valve timing as well so the flywheels were fitted to smooth the running.

if nothing else, this has been a great engine history lesson.

thanks.

Wow, some story. At this point I would hope that Uber and Grady have some private conversation and hopefully a meet up. I just want to see the end report.

It is the real deal as advertised.

uber, myself and Bill Doyle corresponded yesterday.

There will be more information coming although probably not as fast as the Forum would like.

We all should be embarrassed by the reception given uber. Healthy skepticism is OK, nourish behavior and off-color references are not.



I will continue with 692 information. This is a great subject to understand the progression of 4-cam engines. As we saw above, the 692 was both a progression and simultaneously used with the 547.

The 692 lead directly to the Carrera 2, Carrera 2 GT and the 904 2-liter 587s.

The 8-cylinders are of parallel interest. They were for F1, the 908 and one even ended up in a Factory 914 in the mid ‘70s.

Please add more information and images.

Best,
Grady

This is gonna be good.
Way to go Grady.

I think its pretty amazing that this thing has been found. and in one piece at that.

Great read! For some reason I didn't pay attention to the thread for a while, but today I felt compelled to have a look. Amazing. I have learned more about the four cam engine in the last ten minutes than I have in the last 45 years of my life. Grady, your knowledge is simply stunning. You should write a book.

I have to say that there were quite a few of you in here who just made me shake my head in embarrassment for the forum. You are so quick to judge. Let me point out something to you guys: there are quite a few people in this world who are not necessarily forum savvy in a modern sense and who may in fact be very distrustful of providing much information at all, ie location, name, etc., to total strangers, such as yourselves - especially after the insults were thrown his way, as if he were some child. We all appear to be lucky that he didn't just run away from this forum.

If it were not for Grady, this person would've been gone eventually - run out by you.

Grady, thanks for running with this and for encouraging Uber to contact you.

Fortunately, some of the most stinging comments were actually very inside-baseball to the forum - references to instances in the past when we got stung. Likely, Uber did not understand those references for the stinging criticisms that we forum veterans understand them to be.

Perhaps someone could recap, in a short paragraph for each instance, what happened on this forum with those two earlier trust-wrecking incidents. I know I would appreciate the tutorial. I think it would also go a long way towards explaining why sometimes we react poorly to stories that sound too good to be true at first blush.

To be fair, Uber hasn't exactly been forthcoming with information or details. It took multiple requests of "where are you located" before a reply was made. The magic "how did you come in possession of this engine" still hasn't been answered. I think the second or third post after the engine made CLEAR that he had a 100k motor on his hands, if that was me, I would be a little more engaged.

I just went back and re-read the whole thread. IMHO I don't see anything that is overly critical or inappropriate. Skeptical or half joking sure.

So on a public forum, when someone asks very cryptic questions, followed by more cryptic photos and doesn't bother to answer some of the basic questions, people will be skeptical.

At this point, it seems that Grady believes it is real, so hindsight is 20/20.

I sure hope that Uber can find the car that came out of and sell it for a mint to benefit his economic situation.

If this is true, and if the details ever get out, I bet it gets picked up by other media - Japolink comes to mind. At least that way Pelican (Wayne) will get some benefit for subsidizing this forum and Grady will get some props for the expert he is...

Good luck

Jack

no one with a potentially valuable item should be overly forthcoming with information or details - I agree that many comments put this entire bbs in a bad light.

I suspect that a recent flood of juvenile posters has caused that - one needs only to look at the off-topic area to see how low some people are. Some very interesting people have stopped posting or reducing their answers to questions in the last year or so, apparently b/c of such juvenile behavior.

I'm glad to see the 4 cam info above, and look forward to more from Uber, Grady, John Cramer and others. Thanks to all of you for the substantive posts.

I will simply say that given the number of "too good to be true" posting on this site made simply for a reaction, this one was intially pretty hard to swallow. This is the Porsche equivalent of finding a unicorn, which makes the story all the more unbelievable at first blush.

As this settles in, you'll have noticed the snide comments have ceased and has turned into a damned good read.

As always Grady - thanks for the education

Thank you Grady!
 

Grady,

It is an absolute pleasure to read what you have to say on this forum. SmileWavy

Thank you, and please keep it coming!

Man, what a cool story this is!! I mean to find someone who has a gem of Porsche engineering, and to see the discovery and connection with the good people on this forum!

I love this kind of thing and I'm really psyched to see it come together!

Kudos to Grady and to Uber for sharing this very interesting discovery! http://forums.pelicanparts.com/suppo...s/beerchug.gif

Cheers,

- Craig

So were the flywheels on the cams necessary for the same reason the crank has a flywheel? Why not just add more mass to the crank flywheel?

Grady~ You are treasured by the members of this forum! Thanks for jumping in, and getting to the bottom of this amazing story!

I'm very relieved to see this has turned out to be legit, rather than another hoax. This was so far out there, so far into the realm of "too good to be true", that I was very, very skeptical. This just has to be a "once in a lifetime" find. You are a very lucky man, uber. Even luckier that you found Grady, and that he lives nearby. Good luck, and please keep us posted as this unfolds. I think a lot of us are living out our fantasies through your good fortune. We'll be waiting with baited breath for any news.

Unlike type 912 motors from the Porsche 917's, there were scores of four-cam Carrera engines made over the years and many of them were separated from their original chassis due to the maintenance and reliability issues cited above, so I wouldn't classify this as a "once in a lifetime" event.

It's still really neat that one of these motors has turned up and that the finder thought that Pelican was a good place to inquire about it. I love to hear the stories from the not-long-ago days when this country had about half as many people in it and Average Joe's like us were picking up worn-out race cars for beer money because they weren't competitive any more. The Monterey Historics and Mille Miglia storico came along and made them valuable again and now even worn-out junk is subject to endless skull-duggery on behalf the well-to-do and to hoaxes such as those we've seen recently here on this forum and elsewhere.

I look forward to hearing more about where this motor started life and how it came to rest where it did.

+1 Jack

Nobody asked for his address , social security number or license. He had the time to reply but did not answer questions that would have silenced all the naysayers. Or take a couple pics? why place a white sheet behind it?? Did he steal it? Anyway glad he did get in contact with an extremely knowledgeable individual so it will be interesting to hear the story as it unfolds.

In the likely event that a real 4 cam doesn't drop into one's lap , there is always this!

1:8 scale Porsche 356 Carrera 4 four cam engine model

I suppose these end up in corporate offices somewhere.

I just found this thread, WOW.

Supposed to see Grady tomorrow for coffee. I know that the topic of discussion will be! :eek:

Does Uber's engine run?
Does it sound this sweet?
Porsche 356 Registry: Video of Carrera 4-Cam Engine on the Dyno

Thanks for that. I've never heard one run - until now.

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