Engine back in the car, but won't start!!!

Finally got the engine back in my car after reparing the cracked head and now it won't start. Engine cranks over fine, but I don't seem to have any fuel pressure. As i remember, when the ignition is switched on you normally here the fuel pump run to pressurize the system. My fuel pump is not coming on. I disconnected a fuel line and found no gas. Then I jumpered the connections for the fuel pump at the tank and the pump runs. Used this to pressureize the system, but it still is not coming on when the ignition is switched on or the egnine is cranked. No power at the pump connections. any suggestions?

possibly the immobilizer. Have you changed key heads?

Seem to have fuel in the lines although I can’t hear the pump running. I did purge the air out of the system. Ran my Durametric and came up with some fault codes as follows: 1. Motronic a. PO336 Porsche fault code 10 Engine Speed Sensor Open 2. Alarm a. 48 Airbag signal acknowledged Status not Present Frequency counter 11 b. 60 Central Locking limit position Locks not reached Status not Present Frequency counter 9 c. 33 Interior Sensor Faulty Status not Present Frequency counter 2 d. 21 W Lead (DME Immobilizer) Status not present Frequency counter 1 e. 49 K Lead Status not Present Frequency counter 5 f. 18 Power Windows Status Present Frequency counter 127 I am wondering if either the Motronic fault or the Alarm fault for the 21 W Lead (DME Immobilizer could be keeping the engine from starting. Any Ideas?

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still my guess

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Test: Disassemble key and remove RFID pill. Place far away from car. Attempt to start engine with key absent the RFID pill. If behavior same them perhaps that 21 W lead error significant. If engine doesn't even crank you have fuel or spark problem. Pull #1 plug and crank engine and see if you see spark jump across plug to ground. This will take two people working together. If you get spark then fuel supply next. There are fuel pressure taps on fuel lines but the plugs are not reusable. You can remove the plug, hook up fuel pressure gage and test for fuel pressure but you'll have to have new plugs. Or unhook fuel line somewhere before fuel rail lines and direct fuel line output into a bucket and have someone turn on ignition. Verify fuel pump of course runs, fuel flows and the amount looks reasonable. There's a spec for how much fuel should be pumped in x seconds of time. Factory manual has it, IIRC. Be careful dealing with fuel lines and fuel testing. Just tiny tiny bit of carelessness can have car on fire along with possibly garage, and house if attached, even you if clothes fill with gas fumes or you get any gas on you. Sincerely, Macster.

Are you *sure* the fuses for the fuel system are good?

po336 is your problem doug. Pull out the crank sensor. Most likely caught the wire on the frame bolt either putting the motor in or taking it out see this done lots of times . You can usually see the damage to it without even removing it. Other cause could be the flwheel loose or installed incorectly. car will not run without a crank signal. The other faults are bogus just clear them in the alarm

Brad - thanks for your input. Last night I tested the sensor, seemed to be defective, so I began the "removal." unfortunately this is a 9 year old car that has been through alot of winters. First the bolt that holds the sensor was frozen. It is a 5mm hex drive bolt (indented). So tight that the hex driver twisted and stripped the head. finally got it out with a screw extractor. Then tried to get the sensor out. No way!! It was so crroded in that the head of it (plastic) snapped off when I tried to pry it off. Then i tried to drill it for a screw extractor. No luck, that metal/magnet is really hard. Could not get it out anyway. So, out came the engine again! Decided that this was easier for me than trying to get the bolts out of the bell housing and dropping the trans by itself (though I know this can be done as I had my clutch changed 2 years ago). The good news is that I started to drop the engine at 5:00 last night and had it out and the trans off before 9:00. Not bad for working in my driveway on jackstands. the first time i worked on it for several days. Now that I know how everything comes off it went really quickly. Now for the stupid part. It is hard to get at the slave cylinder bolts when the engine/trans is up, so I decided to wait till I lowered it a few inches for better access. But I was working quickly to beat sunset, and I forgot. My son and I were sliding the engine/trans out from under the car when I felt resistance. Looked and there was the coil of tubing leading to the slave cylinder stretched tight and kinked. STUPID, STUPID STUPID!!! Guess that is what I get for trying to work so quickly. Alot of frustration in trying to get my car running again. Now back to the sensor. To get it out I had to separate the trans from the engine, then remove the pressure plate and flywheel (another set of bolts to be replaced). Then I had access to the sensor from the inside. I actually had to beat on the thing with a hammer from both sides. Man the mother was stuck in there. Basically it finally came apart into pieces, i was able to get the magnet core out, then the plastic sleeve came out. I don't know how tight they are supposed to fit, but I don't know how you would remove one with the engine in it they are meant to fit this tight. Guees I will see when the sensor arrives. I had one overnighted from Vertex, which had the lowest price i could find for the sensor ($109 vx $195 at the local dealer and 1 week away), but the overnight shipping was $45.00. Thought i would go for it, This afternoon when I arrived home I found that Vertex sent the wrong part, and said it was too late to get another out for delivery tomorrow. My local indie found one locally and is giving me a good deal on it. Great guy, reccomend Golz Motors to anyone in the Chicago area. I will have it tomorrow in the morning. then i also need the tube/hose that I stretched. No local dealers had one, only one dealer in the US showed one in stock, turned out they sent it back to Porsche in Atlanta last week. Made a deal with my selling dealer (great guys in the parts dept.) to sell one to me at a reasonable price and Porsche will overnight it to them, will havfe it tomorrow morning. Found out that Porsche will not drop ship parts directly to a customer for a dealer, so I had to find a local dealer rather than Sunset or Suncoast. The Saga Continues

Doug; After reading your post I had to have two scotches and went to bed. I hope you are all fixed up tomorrow.

I have so much respect for you in doing this on jack stands. The only thing I am good at doing is losing wheel locks. 2nd one this year as my indy just called me asking where the wheel locks are as he is trying to replace my rear wheel bearings and I am in Vancouver on business.

Did you get it going yet?

Great job so far and definitley relate to rushing things and making mistakes. Hope you get the right parts and keep us posted.

It will come together soon - I admire your methodical approach and discipline - I can stand to learn from that, maybe we all can.

The car has been started a couple of times now. It was the pulse sensor on the bell housing. Engine won't run without a signal from the sensor. However, now I have been having a problem blowing out the expansion plugs on the end of the camshafts. Each camshaft is pressurized to feed oil to the cam journals. I fabricated a hold down tools and I think it pressed against these expansion plugs and loosened them. They are pressure/interference fit, and once loosened can't be reused. Porsche won't sell the plugs themselves ( a $1.00 part) but only a complete cam, and all the US sourced plugs are too deep to fit. Right now I have a cam out to a machine shop to have the end drilled, threaded and plugged with a hex plug. No way those will ever blow out. Jake Raby says this is one of the "mode of failure" he sees on M96 engines. If the plugs blow out the engine will empty itself of oil very quickly. Then, if the hot oil doesn't catch on fire on the exhaust system the engine will seize up. Either way it is a dangerous/fatal problem if not caught quickly, and if you are out on the highway you would probaly not know it until it was too late. The critical lesson here is that you have to be very careful in using a tool to held the cams in place. Porsche shows exact dimensions for how far to set the bolts on the cam holders. I think this is so you don't press on the plugs. But I made my own tool and did not know that it was critical, as a metter of fact I did not even know there were plugs in the end of the cams until this happened, and I have talked to several Porsche techs who also did not know about the plugs. Seems it would have only cost Porsche a few dollars to have threaded plugs OEM, but we all know how that goes.

Could you thread like a pipe plug in there?

Dharn, I did the same thing to clutch hydraulic line, ~$85 @Suncoast. Been watching your thread. Good luck. My car almost caught on fire last friday, The wire to the starter shorted to the A/C compressor, Be careful with the routing there. It is hard not to touch the compressor the way it comes from that block it is mounted to. Does anyone else's +12 volt starter wire lay on the compresssor?

Here is the type of plug that will be used in the ends of the cams. The insert hex socket will not protrude out of the end of the cam and will allow for a holder to still be used to hold the cams in place during reassembly.

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Looks like a regular pipe plug to me. Is that what Porsche wont sell you?

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They are just a freeze plug? Can they be cut down?

Porsche won't sell the freeze plug, don't even have it in the PET program. Jeff at Sunset Porsche has been trying to get an answer from Porsche on why this can't be purchased for 102 weeks now. No response. There are lots of expansion/freeze plugs available from many sources, but none that will fit, believe me I have been trying to find one for weeks. they are all to deep. There is a shoulder where the diameter of the hole in the cam gets smaller which is only amout .2 -.25 inches deep. As the plugs get narrower at the bottom, you must get the top (open end) all the way into the hole. All the domestically available expansion plugs are .25" or more deep, so the widest part is not in the hole far enough to hold. I tried one and it blew out, even with some JB Weld to help hold it. Now the good news, the machine shop just called me and the first cam is done, the cost was only $50 to drill, thread and put in a hex plug in both ends. Each additional cam will be $35. I am going to take the other three cams out of the car and take them to the machine shop. At this price, another $105 will be the best insurance I can get that I will never have a plug blow out. The question is my mind is why Porsche did not do this to begin. It has been explained to me that this would no be a "robotic assembly" and Porsche only wants to use robots to just press in the plugs, cheaper and quicker. But look at how much we all pay for our cars. Porsche could have done this for less than $100 per car easily and they would never have hjad a plug blow out.

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I'm convinced that Porsche sub'd the water cooled design out and got help from the Japanese on how to do it cheaply and repeatably. The two bad things are 1: yes, Porsche got what they paid for on this engineering debacle and 2: the same crappy design gets 100% repeated when every engine is produced - sad. The real bad part is that an engine that does NOT blow is one that slipped by the quality control and was shoddily assembled and in doing so, stayed together. I think that's the part that Porsche does not want us to know. My guess is that the new 4-door will do them in. Don;t get me wrong - I love the marque, but they whored their engineering credibility and reputation when they let the B-team design this engine. The are going to be eaten alive by VW soon...

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Maybe you could leave your racism out of it...

These plugs should have been threaded in place just like ALL the expansion plugs within the engine.. This is what we do with every engine that we upgrade. The machine shop doing this work is doing it at a cost that is well below what I'd ever do it for, considering the risk associated with the procedure and the fact that I have destroyed cams when doing this. The material the cams are made of is very brittle and doesn't like to be tapped very well. Glad to see you found someone to do this so cost effectively. EVERYTHING that haunts these engines comes from economics.. They are not design flaws.. NOTHING we have solved took more than common sense and the required outlay of funds to accomplish. The challenges I have faced when upgrading other Porsche engines have taken longer, cost more and been more of a pain in the *** than the M96.

Hey Jake, I thought you were on vacation!!!

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Hey Jake - dumb question: by virtue of its name: "expansion plug", which I believe was desgined to 'pop out' under certain extreme conditions such as block freeze, etc. in order to sacrafice the plug to spare the block. So is it safe to assume that the cam plugs in question are not designed to 'pop out' under a specific extreme condition to 'spare the head'???

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We need to be zero tolerance for racist remarks like this around here. - Hans

Yes I am on vacation.. My life revolves around engines. These"expansion plugs" are used throughout the engine, even where there is no risk of expansion because they are cheap and can be installed in seconds via human hands or robotic technology. Its all about cheaper and faster... Except under my roof- we don't even have a clock in the entire facility.

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My Sarcasm YES Your racisim NO - Here's what Wicki says about racisim: Racism is the belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.[1] In the case of institutional racism, certain racial groups may be denied rights or benefits, or get preferential treatment, while reverse racism favours members of a historically disadvantaged group at the expense of those of a historically advantaged group. Racial discrimination typically points out taxonomic differences between different groups of people, even though anybody can be racialised, independently of their somatic differences. According to the United Nations conventions, there is no distinction between the term racial discrimination and ethnic discrimination.

In theory "expansion plugs" in cooling systems were designed to pop out if the coolant froze so that the block or head would not crack. Some basis for this. In the case of oil passages I don't believe the same rationale applies. However, in casting heads/blocks they need certain openings for both cooling areas and oil carrying areas, and it is cheap to use expansion plugs. In the case of the camshafts, they are hollow to carry oil to each of the journals. I think they are made solid, and then drilled/machined out. Then each end is plugged with an expansion plug. In the case of oil passages, if the plugs pop out you will loose all the oil and oil pressure very quickly, the "intermix" would be the least of your problems. In the case of the cams, when the plugs blow out, in turn the caps on the end of the heads blow out and oil is spewing all over, particular hot oil on top of the exhaust system. This can quickly cause a fire. And if you are running at speed on the highway, if you don't have a fire you will quickly be running dry (no oil) before you even realize you had a problem. If you don't shut the engine down in a few seconds the engine would be toast, and at speed who would think to do this, you would be trying to get to the side of the road, etc. It is just a cheap manufaturing technique that can lead to catastrophic failure. I got the cams back today and will post some photos showing before (plugs) and after (threaded plugs).

These plugs are all through the engine.. In the block, in the heads and in the cams... Even in the damn IMS!!! They should be replaced whenever service is done near the components that have them...

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Bob - what about "Japs'? It's in about a thousand posts on hundreds of threads.

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Dharn- Always nice that you are sharing your experience with others. Not sure whether you are just trying to push buttons or just oblivious. I always forget about my ethnicity until I am stupidly reminded out of the blue.

Japs is much better.

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Marlon..all.. We are about DONE with this portion of the conversation, please keep this thread on subject. Thank you! Do I make myself clear Marlon?

Thanks Marc, it did seem to be going off topic in a BAD way.

Well Dharn it, are you going to give us some pics or what? I've seen the valvetrain on a 996TT before on Pelican, loved to see the M96.

Just trying to find the time. Should have them tomorrow

Hey Dharn55, I am pretty new here and I have a 1999 now. I did some searches a while back, and I thought you were one of the guys considering a 3.6 conversion. I think you were also researching or asking about rebuilds of 3.4's. I could be wrong since I've looked at some many posts, but I thought this was in 2008 when you were posting this. So, I have missed the bridge from your earlier posts to now. What did you end up doing? The conversion? Rebuilding your 3.4? May I ask what was your engine failure and the cost to fix? It sounds like you ended up dropping the engine yourself? I did this as a complete amateur on my old 1983 911. Not too hard, especially with no water cooling system. So after all your research, what is your conclusion on going about dealing with a 3.4 failure? I do not have an issue yet, and hopefully never will, but wondering if the 3.6 conversions have evolved since the older posts I have read (I don't see any shops advertising this service on the net - you may have been the guy who said the Rookes does it for $5k turnkey? I assume this does not include the cost of the motor since they are $7k on Ebay??). If anything, given all the potential fires, I think I plan on at least buying one of those mountable fire extinguishers. Let me know your thoughts. It's funny, I was looking for the 3.4 issue to have evolved, over the years, into some type of simpler fix, but it seems that I have learned that Porsche just seems to keep raising the prices on the 3.4. Thanks, Todd

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Folks - My sincerest and humblest apologies to the entire Rennlist subscribership for my poor choice of vernacular and sarcasm. Bad judgement on my part and I accept responsibility in it's entirety. This is a great place - a mini social microcosm of great folks centering around legendary and great cars. So hopefully the aire is officially cleared and the steam subsided. I truly, truly apologize. BTW: shop says my brand new reman is ok - it was overfilled by about 1.5 qts as well as the coolant overfilled. I can't believe how fast this thing is - even a heavy, C4 Tip!!!

Marlon, What are you having put in, a 3.4? If so, may I ask the cost, and what happened to your original engine? I see you say "remanufactured," will that take car or the OEM 3.4 historical potential issues? I've been researching the 3.6 conversion. It seems you only need to remap the ECU and swap the throttle bodies, I thiink. And of course, find a 3.6. thx

OK, just set up a new post/thread with lots of pictures of the cams. Take a look and let me know what you think. https://rennlist.com/forums/996-foru...ded-plugs.html

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Todd - here's the deal: I was looking for a 996 and noticed that they are very attractively priced and during my search I found a 99' C4 Tip with 54K miles that had a Porsche remanufactured engine put in 1K miles ago. The body and interior were VERY, very great. I wanted a newer car, but since I could have a 99' with a reman engine or an 01' with maybe 10K less miles for about the same price I chose the 99' w/the 3.4L reman. The dealer I bought the car from originally sold it (used) to the PO and it started developing a 'tick' soon after. The dealer actually bought the car BACK from the PO and confirmed the impending failure thru a second reliable source and bit the bullet for the reman. The engine was purchased from a local dealer (HBL I think) for $8.2K and was another $2.6K for R&R and odds & ends. I am happy with it. Even with the Tip and 4WD it has more git up and go than my two 993s. I think I would have liked overstuffed seats though - but I ain't complaining.