Poor Man's 3.6 Engine Swap -- Now With Dyno Numbers

[Jack Olsen]

The perfunctory engine bay shot. Notice how clean I am in the picture. It wasn't me doing the heavy lifting on this one.

The Background

I've been on this board for 10 years, now, building, repairing (and driving) what I consider to be basically the same car I started with. What's the old story about Granpa's Hammer? It's had four handles and two heads, but it's still the same hammer Granpa used to use. Well, my 911 has had two tubs, three paint jobs and two engines -- all in one decade. But it's still my car.



I got the garage cleaned up before Tyson made the trip down.

The 964 3.6 engine I put in back in 2000 has outlasted the original mechanic who put it in (lost to a heart attack, sadly), and been through ten years of mostly once-a-month trips to the track. I've run it in POC events, Open Track Racing events, ACRA events, Speedventures events, NASA events, SpeedTrial USA events, Alfa club events, NCRC and ARC events. I've done several seasons of time trialing, one full season of wheel to wheel racing, and three consecutive years of the Open Track Challenge, which involved time trialing on seven tracks in seven consecutive days and driving the same car between tracks.

I drive it to all its track events and also drive it quite a lot as a street car. This includes SoCal canyon runs, like the New Years Day Hangover Rally, but also a lot of just around-town errand running and weekend trips.

I have no idea how many miles I've put on the motor. I once added up the track hours and it was in the hundreds.

So it's no surprise that the old boy started stumbling. It was a used motor when I got it. It's never had any major work done on it at all -- it's never been opened up. Its last track event was back in April, and as you can see from this video taken by a guy driving a built Z28, the car wasn't smoking. But was it down on power? Well, yes -- watch the way he eats me alive on the straights.

YouTube - 1969 Camaro Z28 vs Jack Olsen's 1972 Porsche RSR

The problem was apparent in the leakdown numbers. One cylinder (#1) in particular was pretty much dead. The rest were just hanging on. So...

The Project

Rebuild or replace -- that's the question you face. On the one hand, rebuilds are getting more and more expensive every year as engine parts become more scarce. Replacement motors are getting older and scarcer. But replacing a motor with a used unit is a gamble under the best of circumstances -- and while it was easy enough to find a low mileage 964 motor ten years ago, all of the air-cooled 3.6's are now a decade older and a decade scarcer. Buying a 7-year-old motor didn't seem too crazy in 2000. But now that same motor is going to be 17 years old...


The patient is ready for surgery.

The Budget

So, you look at your options. With a new kid and the bills that come with that, I'm no longer able to throw money around like confetti (I never really could, but...). At the end of the day, I decided to try and simply replicate what I had done before. Buy a used motor and sell the old one. After a couple of months of patiently going through ebay and other online listings, and one bad experience where a scam artist in England was selling a motor that was only a set of stolen pictures (I caught it in time; no money lost), I found a motor that looked to be right for what I wanted. It was a 1995 993 motor, which meant it had some minor improvements over my old 964 powerplant. Of course, this also meant I needed some different parts (wiring harness adapter and an oil line adapter, basically), but Steve Timmins remembered me as his first west-coast customer back in 2000, and got me just the parts I needed from his kit.

Most importantly, Tyson Schmidt agreed to come down from Washington state. I've been friends with Tyson since he posted as 'Brainiac' on this board. When I crashed BB1 at Laguna Seca and had to move everything over to a new chassis on a ridiculously short schedule, he was the one who turned the wrenches and reinvented the car with a new suspension and a host of other improvements (he was working at TRE Motorsports at the time). No one knows the car like he does, and I was lucky to be able to pester him into coming down and helping me do the swap. (And by 'helping me do the swap,' of course I mean 'doing the swap, while I cleaned parts, ran out for items we were missing, picked up lunch, and generally got in the way.)

The visit

Complicating manners further was a visit from my parents -- the first in two years -- that was going to fall on the same weekend as the swap. But this turned out to be kind of cool -- my folks were driving out to Los Angeles from Chicago, not flying -- and also then driving up to northern Idaho for the next leg of the trip. They're both 80, and it's a testament to how much we Olsens love driving that this 5000 mile drive (it's not his first, or his second, or his third) was not a big deal at all to my father. No surprise: Tyson and he got along very well.


Oil draining.

[Jack Olsen]

Tyson Schmidt, master of all things Porsche -- even when he's got to work in a driveway. And in those shoes.

The Schedule

Tyson got in late on Thursday, but wanted to get the new motor apart to see if we needed specific parts -- so we could get them on Friday. In fact, we did, and circumstances conspired to have us looking for a list of seals, filters and a new clutch after lunchtime on Friday. Who came to our rescue and made sure a truck got the parts to Pelican's location before the end of the day Friday? Wayne of Pelican Parts, of course. He made it look easy. I'm very grateful.



That's my 80-year-old Dad working with Tyson.

On Friday, Tyson pulled the old engine and started transfering pieces over to the new one. The engine had some surprises, unfortunately. We learned there'd been a fire in the engine bay, at some point. Some parts that were damaged we were able to grab from the 964 motor. Some I had to go back to Wayne for.



The new motor is in the car.

Saturday was the big day. The new engine was in and Tyson went through the all the electrical connections. The evidence of fire had us nervous, although the damage was pretty localized. Still, when it came time to crank, the engine would not start. It's the thing you dread when you've shelled out your hard-earned money for an engine from a stranger. But Tyson stayed on task through it all, isolating each piece of what needed to be going on in order to identify the failure.

We found that flames had been drawn into the intake -- they'd melted and distorted the screen on the MAF and covered the sensor itself in black carbon and other gunk. Pelicanite James Shira was at the house for a lot of the work and he graciously spotted me some components from his own Tyson-Schmidt-built 1995 993 motor so everything could keep moving forward. First up was his MAF sensor.

Still, the engine had spark, and also got the initial rush of start-up fuel, but then the signal to the injectors was simply not there. Next up, the DME itself from James' car...

Now, it was Sunday by the time we had the new DME in hand, and Tyson's fiance had been very graciously making do without her man for longer than anyone had expected at this point. She was a trooper throughout, and the payoff came early Sunday when James' DME went in, and -

VROOM!

We had a lift-off. Fire problems and some missing pieces and a bad DME notwithstanding, the engine fired up without smoke, ran quiet as a kitten once the oil had pressurized the hydraulic valve adjusters. 200 miles later, I'm still grinning from ear to ear whenever I'm sitting in the car. (It's like falling in love all over again.)




Running! The make-shift exhaust is simply the 993 cat -- and some tips from the hardware store.

This has been a Pelicanite project from day one, and Ingo Schmitz is currently seeing if he can repair the DOA DME unit. James has been so busy with work that he's let me hold onto the loaner box (thanks, James!).

I've wanted to try a Steve Wong chip for a long time, and he's going to customize one for this car on the dyno when the DME is ready. I have to say that I'm already spoiled, though, since James' DME already has a Steve Wong chip in it. Even without the chip being custom matched, the engine runs great. The lightweight flywheel has already with James' programming. The first thing Tyson noticed was that my taller-than-stock 2nd gear suddenly feels appropriate for the car. With the 964 motor, you had to lug a little when you were coming up to speed in street driving. (My car has a very tall second, stock third, very short fourth and basically a regular fourth as a fifth gear, which keeps the ratios close for track driving).

The only downside has been the after-sale relationship with the seller. He acknowledged that there'd been a fire that he hadn't told me about, refused to do anything about the damage to the MAF sensor that it caused, refused to do anything about the dead-on-arrival DME unit, and didn't do anything about the pieces that he said he was sending but never showed up. I've never had an experience like this through three engines and over a decade of buying parts for my car. I gave him repeated chances to try to address the situation and got nothing in return.

On the plus side, though. I've got an engine that feels very strong, has none of the idling issues that my 'flat five' was having in its final months. And the intangible-but-really-cool part of it was getting to be there to see Tyson do his thing with no lift, sparse tools and a complete map to several overlapping generations of 911 components all up in his head as he worked. He knows these things inside and out -- and also has a genuine and driving passion for the 911 that you can see in everything he does. It's a blast to watch an artist at work.

I'll post updates as the new chip goes in and then have a complete report from the car's next track day, September 22nd at Willow Springs.

[Jack Olsen]

More pictures:




The new exhaust sits a little lower than the old one -- there had been more heat damage than I'd liked. An unexpected bonus: no resonance with the Magnaflow, which had been an annoyance with the Flowmaster.




The new engine is almost 1-1/2" farther forward than stock, thanks to Tyson. With most swaps, you have to relocate the coils. Not on this one.




Here's the engine itself. Nothing shiny and clean in this engine bay -- it's kind of a 'Rat Rod' look. I blacked out the heater blower bracket and the AC compressor support to keep the matte black look more consistent.




The garage is cleaned out again. Here's BB2.1.

[Danny_Ocean]

Nice. You make it look too easy.

So...how many bananas for the motor/harness/electrical?

[herman maire]

jack,

nice work. I'm curious to see how the hydraulic valve set up holds up to that track use.

Did you not have some fancy cams in the 964 engine? How does the 993 power band compare to the 964 unit when it was in good health? I cant see it being much different.

thanks

[Jack Olsen]

Thanks. Both engines are/were bone stock. It's a budget thing. Hopefully, a modest rev limit will help with those hydraulic valve adjusters.

[nameisbauer]

Cool job. Make me want to do it!

[vash]

tyson's engaged??!!

(great job guys!!!)

[Danny_Ocean]

How/why do you mount the motor 2" forward?

[TibetanT]

Jack:

Thanks for sharing! Very, very cool. And, to have a master mechanic with your Dad as Supervisor is simply comforting. Not to mention Wayne there for moral support and needed parts....it's the weekend and PP is closed, but someone has the key to the warehouse, right?

Looking forward to the video of the first run at Willow.

Have fun with that...of course, you already are.

[enjefriy]

Originally Posted by Danny_Ocean

How/why do you mount the motor 2" forward?

Better weight distribution and better clearances for working on the engine, (atleast on the rear facing part).
But still How would one re-locate an engine forwards and aft at various positions??

[Jack Olsen]

But still How would one re-locate an engine forwards and aft at various positions??

It wasn't a simple job. Even the shift linkage needs to be shortened. He did it with the previous engine, so there wasn't anything extra involved this time.

[Danny_Ocean]

Originally Posted by enjefriy

But still How would one re-locate an engine forwards and aft at various positions??

I must be on Jack's "ignore" list.

Still wondering how this is possible as the motor bolts directly to the transaxle. It's not like a "Chebby" where you can slide motor mounts back/forth...

[Jack Olsen]

Sorry, Danny_Ocean. The whole thing (engine and transaxle) got moved forward as a unit. It was between 1.5 and 1.75 inches, if I remember right. Some sheet metal was cut. Reinforcements were added. I have coil springs in back, so the torsion bar base was chopped into.

[Danny_Ocean]

Originally Posted by Jack Olsen

Sorry, Danny_Ocean. The whole thing (engine and transaxle) got moved forward as a unit. It was between 1.5 and 1.75 inches, if I remember right. Some sheet metal was cut. Reinforcements were added. I have coil springs in back, so the torsion bar base was chopped into.

OK, thanks for the answer. See you over at GarageJournal.

[agrimmitt]

Jack: Great blow by blow detail. I didn't think you could do much more to improve you car. Since we both are in CA, what or how do you plan to do to deal with smog (now or in the future). Or do you feel it even a problem. I spend an afternoon with Dave's talking about doing the same swap or the normal 3.0 option upgrade to a short stroke 3.5. Love the exhaust tips made of flex water heater venting!!! Thats Great!
Here is to no problem and hours of fun!
Art

[RWebb]

thx for the story, Jack!

you might want to link your main outline of threads on this car for those who missed the first postings

[5String43]

When I was in the magazine business, I would have killed to have had a piece like this, complete with photos, land on my desk. I should think that the author might want to shop it around a bit. If he decides to do that, though, the right thing to do would be to pull it down from here.... Sorry, but this is that good, and that's the way the business works. If he does shop it around, the cover letter would need to say that it appeared briefly here.

[Danny_Ocean]

Originally Posted by agrimmitt

Since we both are in CA, what or how do you plan to do to deal with smog (now or in the future).

His car is a '72 and I'm assuming it's registered as a '72. No smog required.

[Danny_Ocean]

Originally Posted by 5String43

When I was in the magazine business, I would have killed to have had a piece like this, complete with photos, land on my desk. I should think that the author might want to shop it around a bit. If he decides to do that, though, the right thing to do would be to pull it down from here.... Sorry, but this is that good, and that's the way the business works. If he does shop it around, the cover letter would need to say that it appeared briefly here.

I believe Jack is a writer of some sort. What I want to know is how does someone do this major work and then have the time/patience to grab a camera and snap pics? When I'm in the middle of a project, I've got grease/oil head-to-toe and the last thing I'm thinking of is taking pics. Throwing wrenches and cursing? Yes. Snapping pics? No way.