Flat 6 Innovations

I'm not a regular here and I think I may have posted this in another area by mistake. Hi guys, I'm not a regular on this forum but rather a lurker. I just thought I'd share my engine performance upgrade that I just got back from Jake Rabey's place, Flat 6 Innovations. I'm sure that most of you know of or have heard of Jake already. Over the past year and a half or so, I've had the opportunity to attend a few of Jakes classes which were awesome and boy did I learn a lot about my 1999 996. Long story short I ended up taking my 3.4 down to Jake, stood in line and after the year long scheduled wait time my car was delivered back home to me safe and sound yesterday. I promptly put it in the garage and today I had the pleasure of driving my brand new Stage II, 3.8 liter, IMS Solution, fire breathing Carrera C2. All I can say is wow! The car is no longer like anything I remembered it being. Granted I'm still in the break-in stage but man, I can't wipe the smile from my face. The car is making more power with less revs all over the power band. The thing that's making me excited is knowing that the engine will perform much better in the future after everything wears in. My experience with Flat 6 Innovations say's that anyone fortunate enough to have their engine reconstructed by these guys are going to be happy campers. A.J.

AJ, Thanks for the kind words. You were also great to work with, and we all enjoyed having you attend the classes. I love your early 99!

I really want to go the same route as you with my 99. Love the car but a wee bit more get up and go would be perfect I think. Keep us posted as it breaks in!

Double post

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Who's Jake Rabey??

Big Congrats AJ- I saw your engine pics and it must have been awesome to start that thing up! We dropped my car at Flat Six Innovation this week. It was our true pleasure to meet Jake and his team. FSI made us feel at home with their warm welcome, hospitality, and conversation. I left knowing my machine will be back up on its' feet with their incredible skills.

Is the wait time really a year?

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Randy, AJ's 996 was the blue one sitting out front where we unloaded your beast.. It shipped on Wesnesday and he received it last night :-) Yes, we maintain a 1 year backlog, we have since 2012, before that it was pretty much 8-9 months. We started AJs build process the first week of December 2014. He came to attend my class last December, and after seeing what we do, and how it's done, he just had to have one, so he signed up on the last day of the class. No, I will NOT work to speed this process up. You can rush failure as much as you want, but you can't rush success. Actual time in assembly is 4 months, the rest of the time is spent hurrying up to wait. While waiting I do all the design work, and we work to manufacture all the critical components. I added about 53HP to AJs engine, I did that with 100% stock intake, exhaust and ECU tune.

Jake, we've been in each others company and by that I think you know that I'm a straight shooter. Just telling it like it is. 501Max: Thanks, the pics did look good but, to be perfectly honest I'm not so sure that I was is such awe when I saw them. I only say that because I'd already attended three of Jakes classes and had participated in one engine build at his shop so, I knew exactly what I had signed up for. Not to diminish in any way the pics or what was done to my engine but, I'll tell you one of the things I found to be awesome, it was attending Jakes (I think first reconstruction) class. I know that Jake has had to have had several such classes since then and he may know differently but, the knowledge base of the people that attended that particular class was for nominal and a truly nice group of guys. That's the type of company that I like to keep and really felt privileged as an enthusiast to be able to participate amongst a group of that caliber. Andrewck: The wait time is really a year. It doesn't take them a year to reconstruct your engine but they have a board filled with peoples cars that are in front of you so everyone has to wait their turn. The other thing of note is, you don't have 50 million people putting their hands on your engine, it's one person from start to finish so attention to detail is paramount. Having been through the process and now that I've actually got my car back I can now look back and say this. As hard of a pill as that wait time may be to swallow it's really the easy part. The hard part is making the decision and then committing to do it. A.J.

Aw jeez, you guys, get a room.

KC....I know it sounds crazy but when you get in the car and it snaps your head back and you feel the torque take over its a happy ending. I'm sure it doesn't compare to the TT but dang it's close. The other day I was pulling 145 and I was put in my seat the whole time.

On the track Sneaky Pete?

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Not on the track.....it happened on a desolate highway. I scolded myself afterwards

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Pete always drives in full race gear, helmet, gloves, transponder, communicator, nomex fire suit, etc... His motto is "be prepared."

And at that, he still had a gear left...

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Jake, Please clarify for me if the ECU was left alone or was tuned. The statement seems a bit confusing to me. IIRC, you said before the factory ecu is able to adapt to higher displacement increases but tends to run on the rich side? I'm fairly sure you won't disclose any cylinder head, cam, piston, combustion chamber mods but is it safe to say that those 53hp involved all of them to be customized? More importantly, care to disclose how much more tq was added from the displacement at which rpms?

No ECU tuning was required. We replaced the factory tune with an updated factory tune, reprogrammed as stock. This is common place for us for a 99, since the factory tune was updated a few times. NO PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENTS WERE MADE TO THE ECU. The tendency of any Bosch DME is to default to rich when the engine is modified, not lean. This is true even when adding intake or exhaust, not just adding the internal mods that we have developed. Though the DME was not tuned, adjustments to injectors, fuel pressure, knock sensors and other variables did occur, and were required. Again, on the outside, the intake, throttle body, cats, and exhaust are 100% factory items on AJ's 996. This engine is optimized by the application of these items. No one else has developed an engine like this, all the rest require a bunch of bolt on (junk) that always has a caveat. Of course it did. The people that just add displacement to these engines won't get anywhere near those kinds of numbers. An engine must be co-efficiently modified, to be truly developed. There's no single component thats magical and leads to big numbers, like these. Its all in the combo, and that combo always evolves here. I closely guard the torque curve, much more than HP, because this is what matters most, and where our gains really show up. At peak, and over a 750 RPM range, this engine was up 40# over its "before" dyno run as a stock 3.4. The displacement alone didn't do this. Displacement alone will not do this. Keep in mind, what AJ had us create is the mildest engine that we build. I can trump it by 80HP easily, (normally aspirated) and by the end of the year, that might increase to 100HP of delta, if something works out the way that it should.

100 extra hp sounds about where I would like to be, maybe even 200 more (with turbo(s)). 500hp in about 2750 lbs before me sounds like a very fun car.

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Interesting, clever, impressive gain on the tq, impressive potential and marketing - in that order... Thanks for the response, although you did leave out info but I'll take what I can.

I instruct every bit of what it takes to achieve this result in my M96 "103" Hi- Performance Engine Class. If you really want to know, attend that. AJ did.

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Trust me, I probably would if I didn't have 3 kids(and 2 dogs). They would have to miss out on Disney or Legoland for this to happen.

Just don't bring the dogs... Had someone do that already.

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Congrats! There are some great roads in your area (Jasper, IN) for a fire breathing 3.8 Carrera C2. I was down that way just this past June for Parade. Enjoy.

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I am a native New Yorker but, I have been here long enough to agree with you on the quality of the roads. What makes these roads truly awesome is that there aren't littered with speed traps everywhere, within reason you can just go about your business and do your thing. When that day comes that I get the final green light from Jake, is when I'll really start to enjoy the car. It was a little late by the time the car arrived from Jakes place so, I parked it in the garage and didn't drive it until the next day (yesterday actually). Bear in mind, I didn't deliver my car to Flat 6 as an IMS failing, blown up engine basket case. There was no catastrophic failure and I will never no if that was in my deck of cards or not. BUT, that still didn't stop me from suffering a tremendous amount of anxiety, and apprehensiveness every time I turned the key. That's, just no way to live because, I'm not a local driver. Just about any place you go outside of a major city will practically put you in the middle of a corn field or, cow patch. I don't know about anyone else but, I don't do "stuck" & "tow" very well, Anyway, I finally get in the car to begin the break-in process and I realized that all of my past fears had vanished. The only thing that I had to worry about was concentrating on breaking the car in properly, this truly was a brand new day. The road that I traveled that got me to this point with the car is well worth my newly found piece of mind. A.J.