Bradford

Wanted to share some of the projects I have done with my car over the last year.

When I bought my TT 11 years ago it had a pretty fresh 3.8 single plug engine in it (maybe 4k miles). The engine has always run strong and been very dependable. However, there was one nagging problem with the engine. It had oil seeping out between the heads and cylinders. I'd never seen any oil on the floor in my garage because any oil that would actually drip off the heads would land on the heat exchangers. Well any of you that has had oil on their heat exchangers know what that smells like when you get done with a drive .

I had recently retired and thought why not get this fixed once and for all. So I decided to pull the engine and trans myself and then take the engine to my shop for inspection. I had a couple floor jacks and made a wood platform to drop the engine onto. Since I took my time, removing the engine and trans went pretty smooth.





I then took the engine to Schneiders Autohaus up in Santa Barbara. I wanted to keep the car at my house while the engine was being done to do some other maintenance work. I had been speaking with the owner and head tech at Schneiders , Henry, about doing this project for many years.

With the engine apart, they didn't find any glaring problems. It's hard to spot exactly why the leak was happening but I suspect that the heads were not machined properly when the last shop did the engine. When the engine was built prior to my ownership the shop used Wossner pistons and cylinders for the 3.8 which were purchased through FVD. The heads were welded and flame (O) ringed.

I decided to start over new with P&C's from Mahle.





I sent the heads to Verden in NJ to have the them rebuilt and twin plugged.







I had purchased a twin plug distributor from a 993 NA years ago thinking one day I would do this. The distributor was rebuilt and a new set of wires were put on.



I added check valves.



Put back in the GT2 EVO cams.



Henry finished putting the engine back together.



We also put a new Sachs 764 pressure plate in.

While the car was at Schneiders, I spent about 40 hours cleaning the old cosmoline off the underside of the car and suspension.



Replaced the sub-frame bushings



Replaced the rear lower control arms



Engine went back in the car and I had it flatbedded home because I didn't have any bumpers on it.



I removed the Ruf bumpers
Old photo


And put factory bumpers on. Euro on the rear and turbo s lip on the front



The goal here was to build a very streetable engine, nothing too over the top that doesn't leak

chsu74

Beautiful! It is certainly one of the nicest 993TT on here..

DRPM

Awesome project

Where did you buy the subframe bushings?

How is it running now?

Basal Skull

Nice! (Who says something about crickets and this forum?!)
What ecu are you running with the new twin ignition?

rinlv1

Post some pictures of cleaning the cosmoline...

dbf73

+1

LexVan

Congrats on your retirement!

Nice write-up.

Bradford

Thanks

I got the bushings at Elephant racing

The car runs very strong

I stayed with the FVD ECU. After talking to FVD at length and Todd at Protomotive it was determined that this would be fine. It is probably the same one they used for the Andial cars



I took some photos when I was doing the clean up and they somehow disappeared . I can tell you that I had plenty of different size brushes and rags. I put gas in a spray bottle and just sprayed it on and cleaned it off. I always wore gloves and protective glasses. There are so many nooks and crannies to clean it takes time and patience.



Thanks

WhiteCab

Scott: Very, very nice. Never thought of using gas on the compline. How did you decide to use it rather than Xenit or such? Did you need to scrape or just brush it off?

DRPM

are you using stock front uprights / tie rods or the GT RS version?

OverBoosted28

Beautiful!!!!! Do ya have output specs, before/after? Whatcha gonna do wth yer RUF covers??? :-)

tacker

very cool, what material did you use for the flame rings? The first time I rebuilt the engine using nirosist flame rings and I started seeing oil wetness after 5k mike or so. I did have a little oil in the intake so maybe the oil was working it's way down thru the intake valve. Not sure. So I disassembled again and had Verden tool make aluminum flame ring with a little interference and now everything is dry.
Your car looks great. I also did the bushings with the RS rubber.
What did you use to clean the subframe? looks great. I pressure washed for hours, used brake clean and everything else and I'm still not happy with it.

toddturbos

Nice job.

Basal Skull

Are you using a NA 993 type ignition set up? I don't know much about the various options for twin plug ignition. I thought Andial used a proprietary ignition splitter.

I'll have to check to see what the label on my FVD/Andial ecu says. A I understand it, one of the ways the twin plug motor helps with preventing detonation is you need less timing advance to get optimal ignition. It would make sense that a ecu made for single plug then would probably work - as it gives more timing than the twin plug need but not enough to cause detonation with single plug, so shouldn't cause detonation with twin plug. Fueling would be ok as well as the single plug I assume would run richer to prevent detonation/cool the heads vs twin. Hadn't thought about this before. May not be absolutely optimal but should be safe. It would be interesting to do some dynoing and data logging.

Maybe I should do some logging with the other ecu's I have for single plug/3.6.
Andial vs stock vs umw stage 2 vs protomotive for k24's (it might actually be a NA ecu as it doesn't control boost well). Using the same logic, it should be relatively safe, especially with the 5barr fpr (and as the difference between 3.6L and 3.8L is only 5%) ??

Bradford

Thanks. Honestly, I climbed under the car once the engine was removed and all I had was Simple Green and a 5 gallon container of gas. I tried the SG at first and it just wasn't strong enough. Then I tried the gas and it came right off. I believe for the majority of the undercarriage I used a brass brush. The brass is pliable enough that it didn't scratch whatever I was cleaning.

Stock for right now. That is on my to do list

Thanks. Not sure what the HP is. I would assume it is slightly north of 600 with 100 octane. I'll probably sell the Ruf bumpers at some point.

Verden used aluminum flame rings on mine. I had also sent them my new cylinders to make sure the match to the heads were perfect. Thanks for the tip on Verden. I loved working with those guys. It was like going back 50 years in time. Try gas to remove the cosmoline

Thanks

I went with 2 Crane HI 6 ignitions. I bought them from Protomotive. They are very easy to use. I set everything up so once they installed the motor it was just a plug in. Yes the Andial splitter was proprietary. They used to sell them to anyone before they closed up shop.


I would assume the FVD ECU that I'm using is the same as the Andial cars. I questioned their engineers in Germany ad nauseam about this and all they would say is that it would work fine. So far so good. I do only run 100 octane though.