^Ha ha, that is what I have been doing :)
John, I see where you are and have already decided that coming to your shop would make a great road trip for me and when the weather is conducive I'm going to make that trip and have you do a CC and leakdown on my car for me. Then we can go for a ride and you can show me what I am sure are some great roads in your neck of the woods.
Well the root cause of the problem cannot be known until you get in there of course. The symptom of the problem was weaker compression on two cylinders compared to the other 6 and an audible air leak on leakdown on one cylinder at 40psi. The general manager of the Porsche dealer told me that he was told it was 25K to fix by Algar and he wasn't doing that. The specifics of what was to be done are unknown to me as I said. I sure would like to know what happened to that car. I have the vin. Maybe it will turn up on here someday. It was three owner, well serviced but lightly driven '97, rossa corso, spider, manual, gated, 6 speed shift mechanism. LOL
I'm certainly not rich, but I have achieved a level of financial comfort (and efficiency?) where I can afford to own a Ferrari. However, I don't ever plan to have a brain which thinks that paying double a reasonable price for a repair job brings me comfort. If I ever get to that stage, people on this forum may feel free to call me an idiot. I've been around the block a time or two and people are always assuring me things will be done correctly. That's invariably the claim no matter what the price; fifty percent discount, reasonable, or double-what's-reasonable. I admit to a certain warm fuzzy feeling when I wear a nice watch which happens to be expensive or when I drive a nice car which happens to be more expensive than most. But I doubt if the feeling would be better if had I paid twice what they're worth. But that's just me.
Great post and where you live speaks to me about your taste in locales. My Grandfather was from Fubine and my Grandmother from Alessandria.
I respect your opinion. My response is: Don't ever go racing. The numbers we are talking about here in this thread are taken for granted in the world of racing, and yet at the end of the day, an 8 cylinder 4-cam engine still has (relatively) the same number of moving parts regardless of where it is placed into service. My opinion is Apples vs Oranges, I know, but at the end of the day the value of a dollar still has to be justified. Only the guy who allegedly wrote the $40K check for the engine rebuild can tell us if the dollars were justified.
i do need to make a correction in regards to the 360 i mentioned . the car was in kilometers, but that's still nearly 300,000 miles. I know 4renut posts cars in the sale thread that are on copart for sale, i don't know if he does that in the 360 forum also. if so he may remember seeing that car , or it may also still show in the thread. i'll go look.
got it , it was posted on 7-10-13 by 4renut, vin # zffyt53b000121589 . there's a pic of the odometer with 559xxx and looks properly illuminated and working . Could be incorrect , i've heard of rollback's , but never roll forwards. It's possible someone drove it to work everyday , 50 60 miles , 100+ a day for 10 or 12 years . ??????????????????
I believe that if tampering is done with the 360 ECU the odo will go to 555,555 and switch to kilometers. Or something like that...
I thought at first some guy was using it to do long distance pizza delivery. If you've got to spend alot of time in the car.. it might as well be fun to drive.
Car was a west coast car , would be believable it was driven every day. Here in pa on the other hand mine has to hibernate in the garage until spring. If i lived out west you can bet i'd drive it everyday , i'd love to prove one could do 100k plus without problems.
Hello Dave, I was hoping you would respond since you also came from the OEM world. Let's talk shop for a minute while I'm eating my lunch. The company I work for produces brake systems, not engine parts or engines, but we are still a TS16949 certified tier 1. The AIAG core tools utilized are still the same: DFMEA, PFMEA, APQP, SPC, MSA & PPAP. In the production car racing world, we get issued a DVP&R request from the OE on both the passenger car system and the race car system. Some of the PV tests are identical, some are different. The two different systems will still share many common parts and technologies, so in theory, the production system could go racing with minor changes. When I really look at the features of my 355 in detail and then think back to what were the international engineering practices in 1995 when the car was released, or even a few years earlier when it was in production validation, I am both amazed at the HP per liter of displacement and also curious about the PV testing conducted for every single part in the motor. What are your thoughts having come from the OEM world and then looking at actual 355 parts in your hands?
Hi Greg, I'm not sure what you mean - send me a PM if you would like and then we can exchange numbers and chat. Thanks.
Just so everyone knows my cars awesome and not a pos, its well maintained, well looked after and not cheap ass. Ps it's not for sale sorry?
Cavlino...note your compression number on cylinder # 2. This number is a typical find on the 355. Especially cylinder 2. Why? I wish I knew. Usual fix for this issue is a new cylinder liner and rings. The nickasil coating wears out. Cylinder number 5 is also an issue. You have a 100 psi differance in number 2 vs the cylinders with the highest readings. Just imagine how much better she would pull and sound with all cylinders firing as they should. The shop wasn't wrong in saying it needs a rebuild, based on the compression numbers. To make it run as it should, they were right. The 355 is a tricky little car. You may think its good, but many many many owners have no idea what issues their cars have, and think everything is fine when it's not. When they are told somthing they don't agree with, they automatically think they are getting ripped off. It's not the case most times.
Well you would think I would want the FBB car but if I wasn't such a cheapskate I would grab a pbeonix car and not let go. I know those guys and I know what they are doing and still they do it better than anyone else. They are worth 3x the cost if you want to win...or you can be a backmarker.
I don't race any more, but when I lived in America I did quite a bit of amateur racing, so I know all about what a money-pit racing can be. Even at a low level, it seems to suck up all your extra money and a certain amount of money which isn't really extra. But no matter what your racing budget is, the fact that it's "expensive" doesn't mean (to me at least) that paying double the going rate for anything is justified if there is no real value added. For example, when I did a rebuild in my racing engines, I spun the wrenches but I farmed out any machine work more complicated than port matching and CCing the heads. I regularly paid more money for work on my racing engines than I did for machine work for my street cars. Invariably the extra cost (which sometimes made me choke a little bit) was related to real value associated with more work or work carried out with greater precision. I tried to never pay for a "warm and fuzzy" feeling, only for actual value; at least that was my goal and it still is. Of course, the more education, experience, and wisdom one has in a particular field, the easier it is to avoid overpaying and I don't think I'm the only person who ever paid extra because of insufficient knowledge. I'm thinking back about learning how to shoot pool or play poker. I don't have any heartburn about things being expensive. But I do wince when I see someone advocating paying double what an item is worth in order to make themselves feel better when the feeling is nothing but an illusion. I'm reminded of the story of a group of rich Russians visiting a night club and asking about the price of the most expensive Champagne. When told it costs a thousand dollars a bottle, they laugh, order two bottles, pour one down the drain, and drink the other bottle. I suppose they feel better drinking Champagne which effectively costs $2000/bottle but it strikes me as stupid behavior.
Dave, thanks for the reply. Indeed, I will carve out some time to send you a PM with my thoughts. In the meantime, if you have a second, read below please. Mozella, thank you for sharing your experience. Please let me share a little more of my personal experience with you and Dave. I started working for Eibach at the end of 1988 and left the company at the beginning of 1995. I was there for almost the entire duration of our OEM supply agreement with Ferrari for the 348, although that contract was fulfilled by our German plant while I was based in the USA. The USA plant was set up by the Germans, so I know what we did and did not have as design and development resources back in the late 1980s. I left Eibach to join ITT Koni in 1995. Koni had already exited their long term supply relationship with Ferrari prior to the 355 model, but I arrived just a short time after we fulfilled our OEM supply agreement on the 1993 Ford Mustang Cobra R, I was there during our supply agreement for the Dodge ACR Neon and ACR Viper, and I moved across to another ITT division just as Koni began the development of the Ford SN95 Mustang Cobra R. You can say I have some first-hand familiarity with low-volume OEM design, development and manufacturing from that late 1980s and early 1990s era. Now let's tie that back to what we see as part failures during the history of the 355, but put it in perspective to what kinds of processes were used in low volume production back in that era. First, it was possible to be a Tier 1 supplier without a quality certification, because the only applicable quality certification I recall in that era was the Ford QS1. The industry rulebooks for the use of SPC, management of sub-tier suppliers, measurement of process stability and process capability in manufacturing, etc didn't exist yet as I recall. Second, all the design verification, design validation, production validation, and production part approval process methodologies that we take for granted today were not common practice in the 1980s and early 1990s. In fact, in that era we were heavily dependent on on-vehicle testing to perform early design validation, and racing played a center role for specialty vehicles like the Cobra R, ACR-package cars, the Camaro 1LE, etc. We made and sent a lot of parts to OEM companies specifically intended for testing at the 24 Hours of Nelson Ledges, for example. We had mechanical testing rigs, but there were no computers powerful enough (for companies our size) to log and collect data from those tests. Third, the computer design resources we have today did not exist in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Today, we have collaborative CAD systems. Today, every engineer's personal computer can run an FEA or CFD study. I can remember talking to Mazda engineers back in 1990 about parts we were developing for the Miata and they said torsional rigidity studies had to be done on a Cray Supercomputer. As a result, low volume suppliers like ours did not fully implement CAD until the early 90's. I think at Eibach, we installed our first Siemens-Nixtorf CAD system in 1992. If I try to put the 355 cracked header or valve guide wear reports into a modern parts-per-million defect framework, sure, it looks bad. But if I think about Ferrari making a transition from a truly low volume, old-world coachbuilding style of automotive design and manufacturing, and moving slowly towards the best practices of the Japanese over the next 20 years, the 355 represents a turning or transition point in their quality history. Significantly more technology than the cars that preceded it, but without the full production validation of those technologies that might make it equivalent to an Acura NSX in build quality. This is why I think of the 355 as being more like a gentrified race car, and less like a volume production car. Repair prices vary widely as a result. Those are just some of my thoughts tonight, having spent my drive home thinking about those early days of my career. 355 owners on this forum like Ed Zabinski (apex97) and JM3 were on intersecting orbits with me in that same era. Ed, as I recall, was a guinea pig for many Mazda test parts farmed to him through Mazda Competition Parts and used them to great success in the SCCA. We learned from his success and other racers like him. JM3 was doing business with us in the pre-CAD days when we faxed him a design template where he filled in values by hand, faxed them to us, and then we would fax him back an engineering drawing made by hand on a drafting table. Thanks for reading and have a good night.
Did you really say this? Well Mr Know it all, my car does run awesome but more importantly, it pulls a smile on my face. And who are you to comment on cars you have never driven, such as my car?
