yarin

I bought a '72 914 from the hershey swap meet a few months ago. Great condition, plenty of extras. I swapped the motor for the 2nd motor that came with the car. I can't get it running properly. The guy claimed it was dynoed, blah blah blah, i disagree. Either the carbs are not synced, or they need major tuning. Everything else is fine. I can't drive it to a shop. Can anyone give me a hand in my garage in upper westchester? I will pay for your help. Otherwise I need to find a way to trailer the car to a Porsche mechanic.

it's a 72, yellow, full cage, race seat, harnesses, nice and stiff, been road raced / DE / hill climbed for 10+ years. Lots of history to this car.

Please email yarink@gmail.com. I need to get back into autox / DE soon before i go mad!

davidc

Setting up carbs is a little tricky: first you have to make sure the cross-bar between them is at the correct angle. Then you have to adjust each of the idle jets properly. Next you should adjust the rate of air flow of each port. And finally, each bank (left and right) should be balanced. You can do a search on this site for complete instructions for each procedure, and the only part that needs a special tool is the last procedure, which requires a synchrometer. They are relatively inexpensive, $35 for the cheap model, $60 for the good one.

Besides all of those settings a myriad of other things can be going on. Before you dismiss the possibility that your engine has been set up on the dyno, check a few other things. Have the carbs been off? What ignition is being used? Points, petronics? Have you set them up yourself or tested them? Was the engine sitting around without filters over the carbs? Are you using new gasoline?

I am in eastern CT (not far from Providence). If you get a trailer and haul the car out here I will teach you what I have learned when I tackled the same problems.

Otherwise, I can tell you this: If you are going to own a 914, learn to do the repairs and maintanence. They are easy and require only a little reading and maybe some trial and error. If you don't, you will be paying someone to do it for you. If you don't mind that, I can suggest a few great mechanics that work on only Porsche and will not take advantage of you.

DC

yarin

I made some progress last night on the 914. Last week I checked the valves, everything is perfect. Last night I checked the compression cold and hot. 130 across the board cold, and 129, 129, 125, 121 hot. Leakdown was around 6% for the only cylinder I checked.

I really dug into the linkage setup and took most of it apart. The connecting rods and ball joints between the main bar and the throttle brackets on the carbs are old, crappy and worn. They have too much slack in them making it nearly impossible to synchronize the carbs.

I ordered all new hardware that should arrive over the next couple of days. Hopefully that will solve my sync issue.

Before I did the compression test I changed the plugs. While doing the hot compression test I checked each plug. One side was perfectly brand new. The other side was BLACK. This is the side of the motor that "overheated", the carb internals look bad, metal shavings stuck to the throttle plate, not good. So that carb needs to be rebuilt and both tuned.

So far i'm much more relaxed about this whole purchase. Keep in mind I was told this "race engine" was rebuilt and dyno tested. BS!