Mark's Porsche 914 Page - Sponsored by 914World.com

Bought a scrapper in Tehachepi, CA for $250. It came with a 1.7 engine and a pair of Weber DCNF carbs. The body was horrible. 4-5 different colors of paint and an amateur slant nose conversion. I stripped the car bare and cut off the fenders then traded it for parts for my next Porsche 914. It was a great learning experience.Pictures
Found a decent '73 2.0 near Davis, CA for $200. No engine, but a good body and a sideshifter tranny, as well as all the neat interior stuff for '73 2.0s. This car is still my project, although I will retire/sell the chassis at some point because there are too many little dings and dents to fix. Pictures
Picked up a neglected '71 1.7 in Novato, CA for $50. Came with a 1.7 with fuel injection, a straight body (with factory custom Aubergine paint), a bunch of garbage in the interior (tires, booze containers, sticks, sand, etc), a broken front window, no top, bad paint, sand on/in the engine, and more. Fortunately the body appears straight and dent free. Unfortunately the car didn't come with the title, so I have to sort that out. Pictures

02/06/2003 - I reinstalled my gas tank yesterday and started it up for the first time in about a month. I had the gas tank cleaned and coated for about $85. It wasn't really worth it. If I had to do it again, I'd clean it myself and just have them coat it. That's only $12. Changing the fuel filters didn't have any effect on the jerky running condition. But at least I won't have to think about rust in the fuel any more. I've been trying to use the O2 sensor the last couple of days. I've basically decided that for tuning an engine, you really need a five wire, wide-band O2 sensor. The narrow-band sensors don't really tell you much because they're slope is so steep around stoichiometric. The wide-band is more linear, plus you get more resolution from the 0 to 5 volt reading, versus 0 to 1 volt. I'll pick one up next month at work and really see what it can do. I will also be starting work on my injector tester. I have been picking out parts at work and pricing things out, so when I have the spare money I can just pick everything up and put it together pretty quickly. It will be nice to be able to feel confident about my injectors as well. One by one I'm going to tackle these systems until I have them all beat into submission. Look for more updates in the next couple of months.

12/09/2002 - Recently my friend Brandon welded in an O2 sensor bung for me. We had tried to make the O2 sensor work, but couldn't figure it out. Well I have a heated 3-wire Bosch unit and I misunderstood which wires did what. Now that I've got it straightened out it's working fine. But it looks like my mixture is all wrong, nowhere near stoichiometric. I'm using a common analog voltmeter to examine the output and the voltage only comes up near 1 volt (where it should be for good mixture) when I'm opening the throttle, or I just let it snap shut. I'll be doing a lot more investigating once finals are over and get more familiar with what does what. Hopefully my new oscilloscope (thanks for the advice PBAnders) I got for my birthday will be here this week as well, so I've got lots of neat-o electronics gadgets to learn how to use. I'll snap a picture of the O2 bung soon.

12/09/2002 - It's been awhile since I've written here, but then nothing has really happened with the car either. I got my RAMS rebuilt MPS back from Jeff Bowlsby who had it for calibration. He did a great job, but there's still bad things going on with my fuel injection. I have a list of things to check as soon as my finals are over. 1. Check TPS alignment. 2. Adjust valves. 3. Check fuel filter. Checking the fuel filter is going to be a bitch because I just filled up the tank before I parked it. I'll have to pump out over 10 gallons of fuel. While the tank is out I'll evaluate adding the removable panel that was stock on the later models for accessing the fuel pump and filter while the tank is still installed. I'm losing hope and motivation with each failure. Damn this FI stuff is hard. I guess that's why I've been so keen on working on my stereo. =) I bought 4.5" speakers to put behind the seats which really help to round out the imaging and now I'm aching for my subwoofer setup. I'll have the rockin-est parked car anywhere. *grumble* Oh well, chin up and all that. School will be over soon and then I can spend more time tinkering.

10/29/2002 - Today when I got home I was excited to see that my throttle switch had arrived. Installing the switch is quick and easy, but unfortunately it didn't help my car run any better. It must be a MPS problem. Tomorrow I'm going to check the vacuum on it and see if it's still holding vacuum. Now I need to finish my air/fuel meter, but I had a realization that since I'm not done with the meter yet, I could still install the O2 sensor and just use a voltmeter to read the values directly. This will also be good because I don't know if my sensor is a wideband model or not. If it's wideband, then the meter I'm making won't even work. I spent around $40 on parts for the meter and now that I've done a little research I found a great looking meter at SpeedShop.org for only $75, as well as ones on eBay for around $50-$60. I might just scap the whole project and use my voltmeter realization since I never planned to have the O2 sensor and meter permanently installed. I think a lot of people probably already have voltmeters and since a narrowband O2 sensor is pretty cheap, this is well within the economical reach of most shadetree mechanics. I'll definatly post to say how it works out. If my sensor is narrowband, I'll have to get a wideband for more accurate readings.

10/23/2002 - I called Otto's Venice since I still hadn't received my parts. It turns out that there was a glitch and my parts were never ordered, and thus never shipped. Hopefully that will get sorted soon because I'd really like to drive my car. You 914 folk know about this. =)

...previous entries...

--back to mark's other pages--