Stuttgart Swappin’

05 Sep Stuttgart Swappin’

It wouldn’t be Fluid MotorUnion if we weren’t swapping a motor at some point. Since it’s been a while, let’s do another!

Some swaps aren’t planned out at all. Some aren’t even a thought until that moment strikes. No more is this prevalent than in the world of Porsche (crank-walked DSMs are close, though). Hell, at the last service conference we went to, there was an entire class centered around how to tell a Porsche owner that his motor has gone kaput. Either way, that class came in handy not too long ago, when a customer brought in his 1970’s Porsche 911 for repair. It was in for just basic maintenance, including various gaskets and all that fun stuff. While removing the valve covers to replace the valve cover gaskets, the head studs came out with the valve cover — they’d essentially disintegrated. After plenty of discussion, it was decided to ditch the 911’s 3.0L motor in favor of something a bit more powerful. In lieu of sticking with the same, the 911 will be receiving a 3.6L motor from a Type-993 911. Instead of the 3.0L’s output, which is right around 200 bhp, the 993’s motor puts out approximately 282bhp in this trim. Quite the upgrade, indeed! And, to boot, we received this lovely (albeit a bit busted) car-shaped box surrounding the motor.

Removing Porsche motors, once you’ve done a few, can be nailed down relatively easy. Thankfully, the car-shaped box around the 993 motor was only holding the motor in place by way of a handful of bolts. However, we wanted a sturdy platform that we’d be able to connect to our heavy-duty transmission jack, so that we could lower the motor and transmission in a single effort while keeping the motor balanced (rather than teetering, as the trans jack doesn’t have a very large platform). Since we didn’t have a platform of that type handy, we just built one instead, using some of the steel we had on hand in fabrication.

With the platform completed and connected to the transmission jack, we set the assembly underneath the engine bay and began the process of undoing the handful of bolts holding the motor and transmission into place. After some careful undoing of said bolts, we had one empty car-shaped box and one 3.6L flat-six ready to transfer over. Thankfully these things are FAR easier to deal with than actual transplanted organs; we don’t need to put this in a cooler while we prep the recipient.

With the 3.6L sitting in the corner, patiently biding its time, we pulled the 911 up to the rack to begin removing its old, busted motor. This motor, unlike the 993’s, comes with a significantly larger amount of connected accessories, hoses and bolts (namely, all of them), so there’s just a bit more required in dropping this motor.

As more and more pieces of the motor are removed, it’s time to get the trans jack and its platform into place.

A few more bolts out of the subframe, and there you have it, the old heart is out!

Now, with both motors out, we can swap over everything that we need to, before we begin the (slightly laborious) process of putting a 3.6L 993 motor into an original (pre-964) 911. There are some things that don’t transfer over directly, which we’ll be tackling in a blog post all its own, but for now we wanted to let you know that swapping never stops over at FMU. Plus, 40-50 pictures are just way too much for a single, expository blog post that isn’t related to a car show or weekend trip.

In other, less serious news, we’ve always known that we are a family here at FMU. This was taken to absurd new heights, however, by none other than Disney. Apparently they’ve taken their definition of family rather loosely, as the ‘MotorUnions’ are now on a marketing list somewhere. That sounds like the beginning of a great reality show, don’t you think? Maybe we can get Disney on board; apparently they consider us a family just as much as we do.