I bought the car 1 and 1/2 years ago from an estate sale. The car was originally purchased at Sierra Porsche Audi in Riverside California. The original owner drove it for 5 years and then kept it as part of a "static desplay" in his car collection. The odometer showed 77,500 miles. The last plate was stickered in 1980. So you can imagine that when I started it, everything that could leak, did. Thank goodness it isn't watercooled! One less fluid to worry about.
Martin resealed the motor last year and it has virtually no leaks. You can kill it by covering the throttle body. But, nagging poor running and poor power issues lingered.
Martin has been tuning and tweaking for weeks, maybe even months. Things get better but not great. We had many discussions and were focusing on it as a DJet issue. As it turns out we were partially right but wrong as well...
The car would start and run like
a steaming pile of Stromberg until it warmed up. Then, once it warmed it had poor throttle response and seemed down on power. It seemed to be burning fuel in the exchangers as lots of heat was coming out from under the car but the temp gauge was pretty much normal for what you would expect. Nothing Martin would do would correct this and he had begun to utter words of hate toward my 914. Those of you who know Martin will understand that he so loves the 914 that these utterances were blasphemous in his religion. I was concerned. Not just for my car but for Martin's eternal 914 soul.Finally last night a breakthrough occured. I had purchased a couple new and expensive DJet components, a throttle position sensor, and injector points. I was only suspicious of the throttle position sensor because of the poor throttle response and the injector points were out of frustration. I had come to the point that I was going to just throw parts at the problem until it was solved. This is expensive and usually leads to people selling their car at much less than what it cost to build. Not something I would advise but it illustrates my state of mind.
So last night, Martin installed the throttle position sensor, and sure enough the response improved but the hot exchangers and the off idle hesitation continued. Suddenly, with the throttle response cleared up, it became clear to Martin that perhaps, the vacuum advance was not functioning. A quick check of this proved it was funtioning but Martin wanted to take a look at the mechanical advance plates so he pulled the distributor. What the heck! We were going to throw a set of injector points at the problem anyway right? Well, what he discovered made perfect sense considering the cars history but it illustrates how hard it can be to sort through the problems of ressurecting a car that has not been driven. Both the vacuum advance and the mechanical advance were gummed up from years of sitting. They moved, but were stiff. Martin performed a little Same Day Surgery and did a miniature rebuild on the distributor. Once this was done, and the distributor back in, we fired it and timed it. Hmmm. It ran better. The hesitation was virtually gone.
This morning, after dealing with the gal from the blind store, I took it for a drive to make sure it was not messing with us in order to dash our hopes. Nope, once warm it runs like a champ. Lots of power, pulls well.
So Martin, this Buds for you... Thanks buddy!Rob
