So...I'll start you all out with my a description of my day. If you don't care about my day, skip down to the bold section which is my porsche problems. First off, I have been awake since wednesday at 11:00 am, so I believe this is going on 31 hours, and that was with a paltry 4 hours of sleep tuesday night/wednesday morning after hitting much of the sauce at the local college bar tuesday. All right, heres the deal. A friend of mine hit a large metal object in the middle of the freeway with his 92 integra LS about 5 months go, put a .45 cal sized hole in the oilpan, didn't know it, drained all of the oil, siezed the crank and cracked a rod or two in half. The motor is toast, so he decides he would like to have a performance motor built for his car. Fast foward to last week when the motor finally began being built and installed in his car...its your standard honda frankenmotor...B18A (DOHC non-VTEC 1.8L integra motor) bottom end with fresh seals, disassembled and reassembled to check for bearing condition and tolerances, new piston rings installed (he had GSR pistons that were going to go in the motor, which would have bumped his compression up over a point and netted 15 or 20 more HP, but the machine shop that was cleaning them up cracked one, so he has the stock LS pistons)...top end is a B16A head...in production from '88 until '01, its the head found on several R, SiR, typeR, etc. japanese civic and integra bodies that never made it to the US, and is in civic del-sol VTECs, Civic Si's, and with stiffer valve springs and different cams, the integra type R. The head was cleaned up, but my friend opted not to spend the extra $350 for a valve job, 5 angle grind, new valve seals, etc., and this didn't seem like a big deal since the guy building his motor has done dosens of these hybrid motors, most without disassembling the head, and never had a problem. After fighting his aftermarket alarm to get the car started, the car blows a mysterious bluish white smoke out of the exhaust and idles funny. The idle is finally fixed, everything is wired up and ready to go, but the smoke which should have lasted maybe 30 seconds or a minute hasn't stopped. Pulling a spark plug and looking down the hole reveals something terrible...oil running down the cylinder walls and pooling on the pistons...all of the pistons. All of the valve seals are bad...the only other thing that could cause this is bad guides, but they would have to pass through the valve seals. The guy building his motor says he'll replace the valve seals when he gets back from NOPI, and that the car should run fine with minimal oil consumption. Regardless, my friend needs his car NOW, so I drive it to him after we bolt the hood back on at 5:00 in the am. Its fast...damn fast (well..its no 951, but very fast for a naturally aspirated 1.8L 4), and the only sound I enjoy better than a DOHC honda on the VTEC lobes is a ferrari at 8 grand, so I am having a good time running this car at full song several times on my voyage home, but I am not enjoying the blue smoke shooting out of the exhaust which I usually associate with old dodge caravans. Oh well...if its the valve seals, it should only drip a bit into the combustion chamber and not really loose any appreciable amount of oil, right? Wrong...when I got to his house (100 miles) the car had absolutely no oil on the dip stick. It used over 2 quarts of oil on the trip! Damn...his gas milage may be 30 MPG, but his oil milage seems to be somewhere around 200 MPG...not good. Anyways, he drives me back to salisbury, and it uses another quart and on the way home (thats after adding stop-leak crap, which seems to have done a little something)...he's pissed he has to wait a week to get it fixed, and in the mean time will probably spend $50 or more on oil. I'm tired, and thats the end of my story.

Now my porsche problems

1. I have done everything I can think of to end weirdness in the front suspension of my car. Everything, and I mean everything, is brand new on the suspension except sway bars and drop links (new stuff includes strut inserts, springs, coilovers, bump rubbers, strut top bushing, all swaybar bushings, control arms, ball joints, all associated bushings). I have new tie rod ends as well. I have tightened the locknut on the wheel bearings thinking this might be it, but no dice. I just last night balanced my front tires. Still no dice. The problem is this...when turning around a slight curve (and only a slight curve, like on a freeway) at high speed (over 60) I feel a rapid vibration that is much more intense than a normal out of balance tire or something like that in the front end that is mostly felt in the steering wheel. It goes away when going straight, but is always there in the turns. Any ideas?

2. I balanced my own wheels last night (my friend let me use his machine at his shop)...I couldn't do the normal side to side balance..every time I would tape the weights in place (I would tape them first to make sure they were correctly placed, then if I got them correct I was going to peel the paper off the glue to stick them to the wheel) the wheel would end up further out of balance in different spots. I am positive I was using the machine correctly. Using a static balance (uses 1 weight in the center of the wheel as opposed to being side to side) I was able to balance them, and apparently it worked well as I detected no shimmy or vibration up to 100 MPH today when I tested my job balancing (except when slightly turning, but I don't think its tire balance related).

This is what pisses me off...I never looked at the counter weights on my wheels, but my passenger's side front wheel had over 3 ounces of counter weights on it, only in one spot! 3 friggin' ounces! I watched this wheel spin on the balancer, and its bent! I have NEVER hit a curb, pot hole, etc. with these wheels...they have only seen smooth sailing...judging from the massive counter weight, I am guessing they were bent before tire rack shipped them out with the tires installed. How could they sell a wheel to a customer that is bent, just to compensate for it with massive counterweights? I wish I learned this earlier. What can I do? An entire section is bent a couple of mm toward the center of the wheel...can these be straightened? They are mille miglia cup II 993 replica wheels.

Sorry for the novel guys...its just been one of those days, and now I am going to sleep until friday PM. Peace!

 

Since you have already eliminated a number of possible causes, a bent wheel could absolutely e the cause of your problem. Another possibility is water in the tire. If your air compressor hasn't been drained recently, and you use it a lot, it is possible to get a little water inside the tire. Not very likely, but possible, resulting in a wheel being impossible to balance.

As for your friend's car, doesn't it at least still have an idiot light for oil level? I can't see how it could be missed. I hit an object like that once, only the hole was most of the bottom of the oil pan and broke off the pump pickup. The noise and loss of oil pressure was hard to miss.

 

Ribs, with all you've done to the car, I can only come up with one remote long-shot possibility.

Way back in the mists of time, when tubeless tires were a new thing, my uncle in Cleveland had two odd things happen... Once, a vibration that was traced to a tire guy leaving a flashlight (no s*&t!!!) in a tire after fixing a flat.

'tother was when a tire was inflated from an undrained compressor... about two cups of water.. in the winter... bad vibration on driving off in the AM, always went away in 5 to 10 miles .. water was freezing at the bottom of the tire overnight causing a vibration, then thawing when driven and re-distributing itself to even out the balance of the tire. Took dismounting the tire to find it.

Could there possibly, unlikely as it may seem, be some foreign body in one front tire????

Jim, waiting for a test group to finish... bored!

 

If you had water in your tire, could you remove it, shake it and hear the water sloshing around?

 

Bent wheel.

These wheels suck (I know, I've got them, too) - you LOOK at them and they bend.

Makes sense, though, if you feel it when you are loading the suspension in such a way as to ride on the corner (so to speak) of the tire, no?

Wheel America straightens for $100 if the spokes aren't bent, but it will bend again.

 

That's a dense post. Try hitting enter every once in a while.

 

Ribs, Sorry, I didn't mean to belittle your day. I came home planning to post my day as "wierd day" or something and you had beat me to it. Funny how these "blue clouds" work...

 

I guarantee you it's the bent wheel. I went thru the same thing with a bent right front C2. The way I tested my theory was to put different wheels on that I knew weren't bent, and, BINGO! The problem went away. Your wheel can be straightened fairly easily. This should be a easy fix compared to other things that go wrong on our cars.....

Tifo

 

Sorry to hear, yeah those wheels suck. I don't think they're THAT weak, but it did take me I believe 7 wheels to find 4 OK wheels. Through the course of 5 months I bent two of them, and after a lot of b*tching my 'supplier' at the time shipped me two straight wheels (that I made my insurance company pay for).
Ahmet

 

Just a shot in the dark, but have you done anything to your steering? Maybe something in the power assist mechanism? Or perhaps the rack itself is bad? Hope you find it.

Edit: I noticed you only did tie rod ends, well you might wanna look at doing the whole tie rod. I just did this and there was alittle bit of play in the ball joints on the end of the entire tie rod(where it connects to the rack).