Gcracker07110

Ok nothing's changed this car is Bloody Marvelous!!!!

I posted my 1st impressions after 50 miles a week ago and due to the snow was u able to get the car out until yesterday. Over the last 2 days I have put an additional 400 miles on the car in order to get it all nice and broken in. I limited my driving on highways so as limit the amount of time driving at constant rpm so mainly roads with constant corners requiring lots of rowing on the box.

I have a specific break-in procedure that I use for all my cars to seat the rings and bed the pads in, you are welcome to comment on my procedure this is what I have done for all of my performance/race cars/engine rebuilds.

Step 1: I drove the 1st 100 miles very easy, changed the oil yesterday strained the waste oil to see if there were any foreign objects in the waste oil.

Step 2: The next 100 miles I start getting a little more aggressive, again nothing extreme but getting the rpm up in the

Step 3: The hill..... There are two rather steep hills not far from where I live on 280 between Orange and Livingstone and thy are back to back. The objective is to drive both hills 5 times in each direction and gradually increase the load on the engine, on the downhill sections I take the opportunity to bed the pads in. In order to properly seat the rings you need heat but you need to gradually increase the heat so as I traverse the hills the first 2 runs I'm shifting at 4000 rpm and keeping the load on the engine, the next 2 runs I increase the shift point by 500 rpm. I use the oil temp gauge to determine that the heat in the engine is increasing. After traversing the hills I have 2 miles of fairly level driving to get the oil temp back to 194F which seems to be my engines constant temp. As I traverse the hills the oil temp climbs into the 230-240 range.

Step 4: After getting the car home I changed the oil again and checked for any foreign objects I use a fine mesh strainer and magnetic pick up tool to determine if there's anything floating around in the case that shouldn't be.

This morning I went out and after a good clean on to more spirited driving gradually increasing the rpm to 6-6.5k with a couple of aggressive launches and hard acceleration.

I love this engine, it's probably one of the greatest NA production engines, the engine is so flexible it's ridiculous. Obviously it doesn't have the low down torque to pull hard from 2500rpm in 6th but drop the cogs and get on the gas at 4500rpm and wow what a great experience.

The (not so) Bad: A couple of bitches, nothing major and certainly subjective;

The exhaust drone with PSE on the highway is annoying, I switch it off on the highway and turn it back on when I get to my exit. I love the sound under hard acceleration on the highway, I also like the growl when your passing in 6th gear without shifting down but under constant throttle the drone is a bit much.

Inertia bump, I was expecting the engine mounts to be phenomenal and under acceleration they are, but I did notice when getting off the throttle quickly, there is a noticeable bump behind me as the weight transitions at the moment of inertia. I found this a little disappointing after reading all the porsche marketing blah on the engine mounts.

The good;

Handling of the car is great, it's point and shoot for the most part and the precision you can achieve with the steering of this car is very impressive. The weight shift into and out of corners is very apparent, there's a lot more feedback than I was expecting and the body roll is surprisingly minimal ( I have SPASM but not PDCC).

The engine, LOVE this engine, I was telling my wife about my ride today and I was trying to explain to her why this engine is so great and her response was "why don't you marry the engine if its so great"

Escort 9500ci, works great, was getting onto 287N from 80 and usually I will hammer the throttle when joining 287 but my escort started chirping 1 bar and as I rounded the jug handle the signal increased a bit more so I eased up and settled in the middle lane while checking the mirrors and I notice a state trooper about 800 yds back joining 287 and he quickly moves to the middle lane also. This went on for about 3 miles at which point he pulls into the outside lane and guns draws level with me eyeballs me and the car and then guns it and takes the next exit.

Very happy with the 3M wrap up front, with the salt shortage in NJ some towns are putting down gravel on some side streets which forced me down to 10-15 mph thankfully the wrap is working as intended

I haven't had the opportunity to really test the breaks yet in any significant way but they perform fine in normal driving conditions, made a couple of hard decelerations from higher speeds and they performed perfectly but will need to get on the track to really see how the perform.

The trans is still great, the most challenging shift is 6th to 5th as the shifter seems to pull to the left towards the 3rd gear gate and its important to maintain a light but firm shift forward to ensure that 3rd isn't selected by accident. If you grip the shifter lightly in your palm and finger tips (no thumb) you will feel the pull to the left as pressure on your thenar (fleshy part of the hand below your thumb).

At this point the engine is pretty much broken in and I have to say I'm very happy with the way the car is performing

chuckbdc

That PSE "drone" is probably the piped in intake sound (AKA "Sound Symposer") a valve that opens up when you place the car in Sport or Sport Plus mode. If you search the forum you can find many posts on how to plug the pipe, defeat the valve or whatever you want to do to end the noise.

LexVan

2 early oil changes? You're my new hero!

Side question. How many quarts needed for an oil & filter change.......8? Thanks.

i911

Thanks for the write up. What was your finding in the examinations of the waste oil?

Gcracker07110

For the most part the oil has been pretty clear, the first oil change contained some very fine particles that could have been casting residue. After upturning the sieve on filter paper there was a gritty residue almost like very fine pumice. Consistent with most cast blocks but most common sports bikes, typically sports bikes are shipped with very low viscosity oil which should be changed after 250 miles with the primary purpose of flushing any very fine particulates

LexVan

Too bad you did not pull an oil sample and send to Blackstone for a UOA and establish your baseline.

Gcracker07110

I have a sample and the filters which I will cut open to examine

LexVan

Great. Please post your UOA's when you get them. Maybe you can start a post on "991 UOA's" and ask a mod to make it a sticky up top.

Did you use Mobil 0W40?

Team Plutonium

Wait... 450 miles and already 2 oil changes? You know they have medication for that, right?

Gcracker07110

Mobil 1 0W40 yes

Will post baseline UOA when I get it

LexVan

8 quarts needed? Or more?

Gcracker07110

Jury is still out on that one, after the initial oil change I put just shy of quarts in and when I ran the oil check I was one bar shy of full. Decided to drive and see if it went up after driving around for a bit, it didn't.

On the second oil change I put in 8.75 quarts and oil measurement showed full. So not entirely sure why the difference, possible mis read, oil may not have been at full temp too many variables....

WCE

I've done two oil changes also (over 16,000 miles however). After an overnight drain, 8 1/2 quarts puts you in the safe range to start, might want to add a bit more later to top off after getting some oil level measurements.

chuck911

And consistent with the grease that is used in assembly of pretty much every engine ever done the last hundred plus years? If I read things right you're having oil analysis done on both changes which is great. Even better would be to know the composition of the various lubes and sealants used, they will no doubt comprise the bulk of what comes up on the first test. And a lot of the second. Don't forget that changing the ~8.5 quarts, no matter how well you drain there's a good few quarts remaining in the system. Could easily be 2 qts, which if it is then ~25% of the next read is still oil from the last read.

But really, can you find someone reliably knowledgeable to tell us about the various lubes used in assembly? Even better if some engineer can tell us what's in the grease. That will save a step. But as long as we know the product and amount we can find out the composition. Then from those two things its simple math to work out the expected parts per million that will show up on the first oil analysis. And the second.

Lube and sealants ought to account for the majority of it. Next thing to know is the composition of the journal bearing babbitt. The majority is usually tin but antimony and copper are in there as well. If anything is going to wear down it will be these very soft materials. But they won't, because a simply astonishing amount of technical knowledge, engineering and machining has been developed to ensure the whole thing runs on hydraulics so that the moving parts do not come in contact with each other. http://edge.rit.edu/edge/P14453/publ...l_Bearings.pdf

The above is just one of many informative technical articles searchable for anyone truly interested in understanding how engines work. They are all like this one exceptionally technical, dry and boring. None of them ever says anything directly about what we really want to know, about break-in, or failure. And yet it is precisely because of this dry technical knowledge that I was able to, for example, describe for Nicoli the exact sound he heard from his recent engine failure experience. So it does pay off and I'm looking forward to the oil results but its not like we haven't been here before.

Lube info, anyone?

Gcracker07110

Good point Chuck will be interesting to see what the significant peaks are on the 1st sample vs. 2nd sample, not sure that we will e able to deduce a lot but will be interesting nonetheless