Had this award winning 944S2 cab towed into the shop this week for engine problems. The car was running at idle, shut off and wouldn’t turn over. I found that we could turn the crank over by hand until it would hit a stop, and then could turn it backwards until it hit a stop. Not good. I wasn’t sure if there was going to be a bad rod, broken cam tensioner or what. I pulled the cam cover to …

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Apr 10 2013 wes Editorial No Comments

We’re going through another set-up from another shop that just couldn’t get the Webers right. Trying to do all the carb work on the car with homemade stuff won’t work.  But if you are looking for a quick baseline before deciding where to go with the car, or making changes to fresh carbs, these tips can help.  As always check plugs, cap, rotor, timing, compression, fuel pressure and valve adjustment before try to put a good tune on the carbs. First change we had to make to these were the …

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Apr 10 2013 wes Editorial No Comments

When you suddenly can’t open your door from the outside on an X5 the typical issue is that the mechanism that the outer handle goes into has broken.  When this one came in that is what we found. Remove the door panel, somebody had been here before and broken nearly all of the clips When you fix this it’s important to get the BMW style clips with the rubber bushing on them if you want the panel to stay snug. The two screws to …

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Had this little Pepper come in for a check engine light indicating a couple of misfire codes on different cylinders. There are a couple different things that can cause misfires, one being the spark plugs, and the other being the ignition coils. With modern cars, most vehicles use a separate coil pack to fire each spark plug. In the old days, you had a distributor with a cap and rotor and spark plug wires running to each plug, along with …

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Had a new Chevy Suburban come into the shop the other day for a backup camera install. Since the Suburban (in a very rare red BTW), was ordered without navigation, backing up the beast was a little tricky coming from a smaller vehicle for the owner. We installed an Alpine rear view camera, and an audiovox monitor. Maybe windshield navigation units will accept a plug from a rear view camera. The camera is setup to only activate when in reverse. …

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Audi A6 Misfires

Had this 06 A6 in the shop the other day for a CEL which turned out to be a cylinder 6 misfire and random cylinder misfires. With 100K miles on the clock, it was past due for spark plugs, so I got started. The plugs and coils are pretty easy to change on the 3.0L, but you do have to be very careful with the coilpack connectors. Do not force them, or you will break the harness connector. If you …

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Apr 04 2013 porschedoc Audi 2 Comments

You may remember a few weeks ago I removed a bad instrument cluster from an Audi TT and sent it off for repair. It is very common for these clusters to go haywire, everything from bad LCD panels to dead/erratic gauges. This one was really far gone with pretty much everything dis-functional (LCD’s, tach/speedo were dead, etc), but after some work, we had a good working cluster again.

My buddy Kelly dropped off his 997C4S as it was due for the self contained supercharger oil to be changed. We had not done it since I installed the supercharger a few years ago, and the miles were up. Because I am such a nice guy, and Kelly does like to tinker, I figured I would do a little write up here for him so he can do it on his own in the future. It is very time consuming …

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Had this MB C300 come into the shop this week to catch up on it’s Service A. A good inspection indicated it needed filters on top of the oil change, but all in all is a fairly basic service. Lots of inspection, etc. Engine intake box removed to replace the filters and change the oil. And upside down. And 2 new filters going in! Then it was time for an oil change. A change of the cabin filters and an …

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Mar 27 2013 porschedoc BMW No Comments

Yup, it’s that time of year again. Chump car racing! A couple weeks ago we ventured down to Hallet for the Luck of the Irish twin 7’s. We had a few small issues from last year which I took care of for this season, and the car ran flawlessly on Saturday, taking us to a 6th place finish out of about 35 cars. Sunday was not so kind, as she made it through 3 hours, then Kris “Hammerfist” Loveless overheated …

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