996.2 Fun Winter Project

Good evening, I don't post much but I figured this would be a great way to organize the progress of the car and gain valuable information from others! I Picked up the car from an awesome fellow Rennlister back in December and I'm slowly getting around to it because I have a terrible habit of taking on lots of projects outside of a busy work schedule. The car is a 2003 Carrera with a little over 85K miles. I was told that the IMS bearing had been replaced as well as a few other items while the work had been performed. The seller was also thankfully honest that there was something wrong with the engine but it did still run. I have been meaning to purchase a durametric cable(or equivalent if there are other options) to work on my cars as well as my sisters 997. I will provide links to videos of the car cold starting and a four second video of it idling because if a picture is worth a thousand words a video is worth one hundred thousand or so! You Tube I haven't had a chance to edit the second video but it is a cold start of the car, I recommend jumping to about 34 seconds. The rest is me forgetting to remove the chain from around the front control arm and attempting to drive the car off the trailer You Tube

I haven't made as much progress as I would have liked with my schedule being a little slower. With the way things have been with the pandemic it has been difficult to gather things for this and other projects. I had to drive six hours round trip to get a hydraulic lift cart because I couldn't find any in stock anywhere close by! I had to shuffle cars and bikes around in preparation for the cars heart surgery. I have searched and haven't found a minimum height that the car needs to be at to get the engine out. Does anyone have a rough value? If not I'll get the tape measure out to do some quick planning. So far I've removed the coils and plugs as well as the sump to try and get a better idea of what is going on with this poor thing. Tonight I had some fun findings! This is cylinder number 3. The engine hasn't ran in approximately a month. Number 6 also had the same buildup in the bottom. Once I did some more looking around with the borescope I noticed that the pistons and exhaust valves had all become good friends on cylinders 1, 2 and 3! While draining the oil I noticed some damage to the sump and even a little to the block. I'm genuinely curious what in the world would've caused it but life goes on. There was very minor buildup on the drain magnet so I didn't have any wild expectations when it came for sump removal... I was surprised. The neatest thing I scrounged up from the mess was this M6 fastener. I did some poking around internally with the borescope without any earth shattering findings and at this point working in the unheated garage, on the floor I decided to go in where it is warm and plan the engine removal!

Looks fun. Following.

Cracked sump plates and even case halves, blocks, happen. These engjne hang low so speed bumps and rr tracks can take them out. I got my car dirt cheap because of this. I welded the case and replased the cover. Hopefully u just have a dropped seat and only need the heads done.

Sounds like a muscle car with an aggressive cam lol. That should be a fun project.

Project looks pretty bad ***, hope the project goes smoothly.

I found that with my lift table (Harbor Freight 500lb model - get the 1000 lb one if you can) I needed 25 1/2" from the bottom of the sump plate to the floor in order to roll the engine/transmission out from under the car...

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That is what forced me to drive so stinking far was me not willing to go with the 500 lb model(996 Turbo drivetrain will be coming out in the future). Thank you! I was hoping to have the engine out today but I ended up getting sidetracked and only got a small amount of prep time in this evening.

Post 40 shows my lift height with engine sitting on HF hyd table. https://rennlist.com/forums/996-gt2-...ld-thread.html

I like your wall art.

Quotes source post: 17200820

Ouch... piston-to-value contact + metal shavings, plastic bits, and bolt in the sump = rebuild time. This may be a good time to use Jake Raby's M9X rebuild video series. Love the fact that you're taking on the job yourself. Hope you'll keep it updated!

Right on, someone else is doing their own work!

Quotes source posts: 17203202, 17203324, 17203978

Thank you for the pictures with measurements. Love the GT3! Thank you! It's funny that you mention that because I was on the website looking around the other day. I will try to keep this updated when meaningful progress has been made. I got out into the garage today and made some great progress. For some reason my gameplan had been engine removal...not engine and transmission. After looking at it further I then prepared the transmission to be removed There were a few small things that slowed down progress. The tape measure came out and needless to say I came up WAY short! I'm not proud of the jack stands I currently have and now it makes me hate them. I will be hunting down good jackstands that will allow the car to be raised up enough. Maxjax sure are starting to look appealing!

The last time I had to drop the motor I had my jack stands on pavers I got from HD to get the car up high enough - major PIA but got the job done. You can kind of see my method in pic below, I don't like working on jack stands near full extension as the car gets too wobbly...pavers a cheap solutions.

In preparation for a future engine drop when Harbor Freight was still selling jack stands we got these large ones. Using them with liftbars.com and two jacks the system won't wobble in an earthquake. That is 22" to sump plate not sure if that is high enough to drop motor. Thinking about fabricating a plate to screw to one of the low profile jacks and using that to lower/raise the motor and trans, instead of a HF hydraulic table which is much taller and another heavy item to clutter our garage. But maybe the lift range and side-to-side stability of the hydra table makes it the only way to do it?

Just make sure those Harbor Freight jack stands have not been recalled for defects https://images.harborfreight.com/hft...1196_61197.pdf