As the monkey said to the shopkeeper. . .

The final pieces to this project arrived in October. What we've got here are a set of four Aragosta coilovers, made in Holland, with Roberuta pneumatic lifts, made in Japan, mounted to all four. To prevent error messages from the installation of aftermarket shocks, I also got a Ksport Electronic Damping Cancellation Kit. These plug into the factory harness to mask the absence of the OE shocks.

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I have got back to work on this project. The first thing I did was to remove five of the six nuts from the studs in the forward exhaust manifold, driver side. The reason I stopped at five is because the sixth one -- on the lower stud of the #10 cylinder -- is inaccessible with the tools I've got. I went on Amazon yesterday and ordered two new 13 mm combination wrenches (spanner on one end, box on the other). They'll arrive tomorrow. I hope they can help me do the trick.

Here's the parts catalog diagram for the exhaust. It shows only one of the nuts, labeled #18. I thought these nuts were brass, but they're magnetic, so their brass coloration is from plating or an alloy. Whatever it may be, the copper content sure makes it easy to remove these nuts, compared to the steel bolts I'm used to on US cars.

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Yesterday I removed the driver side fender liner and today I removed the passenger side. I had done this previously, to remove the front bumper, and I could not work it out how to remove the upper part of the liner. So here are some photos to explain how to do it.

First we have three photos showing the three parts of the passenger fender liner in place. Here's the front part, showing the brake cooling duct. You can also see the three phillips head screws that hold it in place. There's also a bracket at the bottom, that mates to the floor pan:

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Here's the rear part, also showing the phillips screws:

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The front and rear parts come off easily. It's the top part that I was unable to remove last time. Here's a photo:

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Here's the trick. The basic concept is to pull the top part down over the coilover, and while squeezing the arch of the liner as best you can, get your fingers between the fender lip and the outboard edge of the liner and work it loose, front to rear. As the liner separates from the fender lip, you continue to pull the inboard edge down over the coilover. When you've got the liner loose in the wheel well, you rotate it the other way, working the outboard edge down and out.

The first step in separating the liner from the fender lip is to pop this tab out from behind the bumper:

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Here is the tab, "popped":

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Here is the initial stage of pulling the liner down over the coilover. Yes, my liner is cracked, either from simple wear and tear or from a previous effort to remove the liner. This is sadly the fate of nearly all plastic parts, particularly thin ones like these fender liners. They are constantly off-gassing the volatile organic compounds used in their manufacturer, making them brittle and prone to cracking. Maybe cracking can be avoided if you apply a heat gun to this area before pulling it down over the coilover. I can't say, since the liner on my car was already cracked as depicted:

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Here we're looking out from the spindle up toward the fender lip, showing the liner rotating away from the fender lip:

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Here's the fender liner with its forward edge resting on the shop floor, after it's come completely free:

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Here's a photo of that tab that you've got to pop out from the bumper to get started. I think it helps to know exactly what you're working with when taking apart a car.

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So there you go. If a picture is worth a thousand words, there's 9,000 words, plus some that I've typed, to help Ferrari 612 owners remove their front fender liners. Not sexy, by far, but I was a bit frustrated the previous time I did this, when I was unable to persuade this top part of the fender liner to come out of the car.

 

Thanks for the tip. I will give it a try. The brake booster doesn't look like it's too big of a deal to pull it forward, but opening the brake lines and then having to bleed the brakes are two things I could do without.

 

@Chindit, thank you for the kind words. I think I will get that bleeder kit, because I don’t know when this car had its last brake flush.

 

Our story so far: I have been stuck on the installation of the clutch pedal at least since September 8 (!!!). After a few rounds of trying to extricate the pedal box from under the dash without removing the brake booster, I decided I should go under the hood and pull the brake booster forward, far enough to enable the pedal box to clear the booster's actuator shaft under the dash. Thanks to the suggestion of @brogenville, I am going to switch gears (lol) and will try to install the clutch pedal by moving the pedal box about and without removing it completely.

But that's getting a bit ahead of the narrative. The initial plan, to move the brake booster forward, took me under the hood. I quickly and easily removed the induction tract, from the air box to the intake manifold. I then moved on to the removal of the 3-into-1 exhaust manifolds. This got me interminably bogged down for a second time, when I discovered there is not enough clearance between the steering shaft and the front manifold for the manifold to clear the studs on the cylinder head.

By the way, of the total of 12 studs and nuts securing the two exhaust manifolds, all but the bottom nut on the number 10 cylinder can be removed from above. The bottom number 10 nut requires reaching up from below the car with a 13 mm spanner and doing one of those things where you do 10 degrees of rotation with your wrench, then remove it from the fastener and flip it over and put it back on and do another 10 degrees, over and over. Also, the bottom nut on the number 7 cylinder is hard to get to, but if you put your 13 mm socket on an extension and insert it below the heat shield -- pretty much flying blind -- you can get at it from above. I used a 1/4" drive socket for this, because of its slimmer profile. But you're going to need a 3/8" drive handle to get enough leverage to break the nut loose.

Another tip: there are two O2 sensors per exhaust manifold. I removed all four without unplugging their pigtails from the ECU wiring harness. But they do get harder to turn as you twist the pigtails with each turn of the sensor. The alternative would be to find the pigtail's connector, buried in the wiring harness, and free it from all the hold-downs which secure the wiring to the chassis. No thank you!

The front three O2 sensors I broke loose with an O2 sensor I got from Amazon:

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The slot in the side of this socket is intended to slide over the pigtail. But Ferrari makes these pigtails so fat that I had to use a Dremel and a cutoff wheel to cut a sliver off the slot, to make it wide enough to accommodate the fat Ferrari wire. Maybe there's another brand of socket with a wider slot. If you find one, get that one, not the one I bought.

You need to apply a bit of leverage to break the O2 sensors loose; in my case a 1/2" drive breaker bar, about 24" long, where it would fit, or a ratchet handle plus one of these wrench extender things:

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As for the fourth O2 sensor, you have to go under the car to get to it. A 22 mm spanner might be nice for this, but I don't have one, so I used an adjustable crescent wrench with the handle extender.

OK, so here's some Ferrari shop manual humor for you. The shop manual says, in order to deal with the interference between the steering shaft and the front exhaust manifold, you need to separate the steering shaft from the steering rack and lower the shaft out of the way. Here is a long excerpt of the shop manual procedure for exhaust manifold removal, starting with the secondary air valves:

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The humorous part is the bland statement above the first image on the third page: "Undo the screw (29) fastening the Cardan joint to the steering box and lower the steering column (30)." As if! Loosening that set screw is only part 1 of the process. Elsewhere in the shop manual, in the instructions for removal of the steering column in full, you will find the extensive additional steps you must follow in order to get sufficient fore and aft movement of the steering shaft in order to pull it out of the "Cardan joint,." It is far more complex than simply to loosen the screw on this joint.

The shop manual also does not mention that exhaust manifold removal requires the removal of the front section of the tailpipe, which includes the secondary catalytic converters. At some point in its life my car had an X-pipe welded into the middle of its exhaust system, specifically at the end of the front section of the factory tailpipe. This modification eliminated the factory clamps, such that cutting through the X-pipe was necessary to remove the front section of the factory tailpipe. Here are three photos, one showing the tailpipe and both the exhaust manifolds lying in front of the car, one of the wound where i cut through the X-pipe, and one of the X-pipe currently still in the car, but with the driver side front section of tailpipe removed:

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The cutting of the X-pipe was the source of another extended delay. First I bought an angle grinder and some cutoff wheels. This cut quickly through the bottom half of the pipe, but could not reach the top half, tucked up inside the floor of the car. So I bought a reciprocating saw and some metal cutting blades. I cut one of these 9" blades down to about 6", which is all you need for this job.

With the tailpipe out of the way, it looked to me like the gap between the engine and the structural components of the inner fender was large enough for the exhaust manifolds to pass through and come out the bottom of the car. This would avoid completely dismantling the steering column, so I decided to give it a try. This gambit worked out, albeit with quite a bit of jiggling and fiddling to get clear. To do this, first you have to remove the very thick braided stainless hose running from the engine to the oil reservoir. This was not a big challenge. Although the brass fittings measure 46 mm -- a wrench size most of us do not own -- they look so much like household plumbing that I decided to use a smallish pipe wrench to break them loose, I then applied some channel lock pliers to unscrew them the rest of the way. This hose runs through a large rubber grommet, to pass through the inner fender on its way to the oil reservoir. You don't need to remove this grommet; you only need to pull the hose through the opening far enough to get the hose out of the way.

Here is a photo of the hose pulled out of the way, inside the engine compartment. The vertical line running across the lower right corner is the frame rail. The brass plumbing running at a 90 degree angle to the frame rail is the hose fitting, with the flange, then the 46 mm connector, then the brass tubing which mates to the braided stainless hose itself:

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Here is the hose end outside the car, draining into a Starbucks cup:

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Here's a photo from under the car, showing the gap between the engine block and the steering shaft, just big enough to wiggle both exhaust manifolds through:

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Here's the money shot, the cylinder head minus the two exhaust manifolds:

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A final thought, that it would have been helpful to remove this block of stuff from the frame rail, to get it out of the way:

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I chose to give it a try without removing this stuff, because the bracket and the hold-downs are a fairly complex collection of parts. But it would have been easier without them in the way. (To help orient you, again we see in this photo the engine end of the oil return line, above this collection of connectors.

It's a good feeling finally to have overcome this roadblock. The driver side of the engine compartment is very empty now, giving easy access to the brake booster and its reservoir. The mounting point for the clutch pedal, you access through the wheel opening, so none of this is strictly necessary for a gated six conversion. But I needed to remove the induction tract and the exhaust manifolds regardless. So here we are.

 

I'd like to think I'm a primate. But in light of the last election, I'm not sure being smart is the test.

 

I want to stop beginning posts to this thread with "It's been awhile," but here I am, back again, and it has undoubtedly been awhile. I'll plead holiday obligations and let it go at that. My wife and her family are from Hong Kong, so in addition to the gwai lo (white devil) holidays we also have October's Autumn Festival at the front end and January-February's Lunar New Year at the back. In fact we're finally wrapping up the celebrations with my 71st birthday tomorrow.

Anyway, it was in September if I recall correctly that I began the process of extracting the pedal box from under the dashboard. I removed the four nuts and two bolts which fasten the pedal box to the firewall, only to find that there is no way this piece will come out without moving the power brake booster forward far enough to pull the booster's input shaft out of the way of the pedal box. That's what led me to go under the hood all those months ago, to pull the secondary air system, the headers, and the primary catalytic converter. I finished the parts removal in November. I returned to the project this week and voila, success:

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The red arrows mark the location of the four nuts, which correspond to the four studs on the back of the booster. The yellow arrows mark the two bolts. The magenta circle shows the hole where the clutch master cylinder goes.

Here's a photo with the clutch pedal, CNC fabricated by @brogenville, dba Out of the Gate Ltd.; the factory brake pedal; and pedal pads from Hill Engineering:

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Here's a view of the firewall from under the dash. You can see the hole for the clutch MC partially obscured by a bundle of wires. The red oval indicates one of the brake booster's studs, on the engine side of the firewall:

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Here's a view of the lack of clearance between the brake booster input shaft -- the golden rod with the ball on the end -- and the tubular steel dash support, with its bracket housing the body control module. (The body control module is the thing with all the fuses you see when you remove the leather door at the bottom left of the dash). Although the shop manual fails to mention pulling the brake booster forward to get the input shaft out of the way, there is absolutely no way the pedal box is coming out unless you do.

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My next step was to remove the block-off plate from the hole in the firewall where the clutch MC goes. Here is a photo taken from above the brake booster, with the clutch MC hole circled in red. In this photo I have already removed the brake master cylinder. The gray tubes are the fuel lines, heading to the fuel rails on the engine. The shiny quilted surface is a thick heat shield fabric.

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Moving the brake booster forward far enough to pull the input shaft all the way out is hindered by the main battery cable, marked here with the two-headed red arrow. Ferrari in its wisdom has routed this cable directly across the lower part of the booster. I unscrewed this cable's firewall-mounted bracket, and pried loose another bracket in the wheel house, but to remove the booster fully would probably require stripping out the entire underhood wiring harness. No thank you! I pulled the booster as far forward as it would go and stuck a block of 2 x 4 wood between the firewall and the back of the booster, to hold it in place while I went under the dash to see if the pedal box would clear. After a bit of fiddling, the pedal box did finally come out. How it will ever go back in is something I don't want to think about right now.

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Here is a photo of the block-off plate. It's mounted in the interior, with its two studs passing through the firewall and secured with the two nuts.

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Here are three photos, taken from above the brake booster, zooming in on the hole for the clutch MC. You can see where I had to use a Dremel with a cutoff wheel to cut a slit in the heat shield, in order to access the block off plate's upper nut. Access to the block off plate, as well as to mount the clutch MC, is through the wheelhouse.

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I've got a few more photos to share, but the Ferrarichat limit is ten per post. I'll return tomorrow with the rest.

 

Here's another under-dash shot of the mounting points for the clutch MC and the brake booster:

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The back of the pedal box is filled with this yellow insulation material. I had to cut the hole on the right for the clutch MC. I used a 1 1/4" drill bit, the flat kind with a screw shape in the center and cutting prongs at each end. I used the imprint of the block-off plate to center the hole.

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The 1 1/4" hole is a good match for the rubber grommet on the input end of the clutch master cylinder. It was also the biggest drill bit I've got:

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The manual shifter setup includes a switch which apparently closes when the clutch pedal is at rest and opens when the pedal is depressed. I assume this is an input for the ECU. This switch is labeled #4 in drawing #42:

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The wiring harness plug for this switch is present in the F1 cars, but it's a bit hidden, behind the dead pedal sheet metal. In these photos the wire is circled in red. The yellow arrows show the six fasteners that secure the dead pedal. To access the two fasteners on the left you have to remove the left front side covering. To do this, first you must pull up the weather stripping. No tools are required, just some firm pulling on the weather strip. Then you unscrew the left rear side panel, because its leading edge overlaps the front side panel. Then you can remove the left front side panel, and access the two hidden dead pedal fasteners.

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Now that you know where to look, you could just pull the wire out from behind the dead pedal without all the teardown. But my guru @brogenville advises that the dead pedal sheet metal will need some trimming as part of the conversion, so it has to come out in any event.

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Here's the connector, with the dead pedal removed. I would describe the two wires as orange and blue with a white stripe:

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Here are some of the parts I've removed in this phase: the pedal box, the clutch MC, the block off plate, the brake fluid reservoir, the brake MC, and the dead pedal sheet metal. Circled in red on the brake fluid reservoir is the third nipple included in the F1 cars to feed the clutch MC. It comes from the factory with a rubber cap secured with the same hose clamp as the two brake lines.

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Here's a bonus shot, the underside of the cap to the brake fluid reservoir. I include this to show the tiny slit that Ferrari puts in the cap's rubber seal as part of the recent DOT recall. The theory behind the recall was that an airtight seal at the reservoir cap interfered with the flow of brake fluid into the MC, to replace fluid that has leaked out somewhere else in the system. The resulting void in the brake lines could give a soft pedal or worse. When I had the recall performed the invoice also mentioned a reflash of some module. Ferrari of San Francisco also paid for my Uber trips home and back, 20 miles each way. I expect all 612 owners will want to have the recall performed, if only to clear their cars' record. But personally I wouldn't fear any catastrophic failure in the absence of this slit in the cap's seal.

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All this talk about master cylinders made this villain of the late '50s, early '60s suddenly pop into my addled Boomer brain: The Master Cylinder, King of the Moon! He was a character in the animated cartoon series "Felix the Cat" -- whom most Boomers have probably forgotten -- and he is literally a cylinder. As well as King of the Moon.

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Today was a landmark day for my project: the installation of the $100,000 pedal! Or in the case of an F1 conversion, the $30,000 pedal. Specifically, today I wrestled the pedal box into place and secured it to the firewall with the two bolts. I also attached the connectors for the two pedal switches. This is a landmark, not just because the R&R was more challenging than I expected, but also that now I can change direction and start putting parts back on, not taking them off.

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Speaking of takeoffs, after trying to reinstall the pedal box with the brake booster input shaft poking through the firewall, I did what I should have done in the first place, and pulled the booster completely out of the car. It’s not hard to do; I’ll write up a how-to in my next post.

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Here’s the booster-free firewall;

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Here's a view of the 612 that most owners (mechanics too?) have not seen before: The intake manifold base with the three red plenums removed:

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My surprise, when I pulled the center plenum off the intake base, was this array of 12 butterflies sitting atop the 12 intake runners. What is their purpose? My deduction is that, under wide open throttle, they ensure that each cylinder gets the same airflow as the other 11. Also, a quickie review of images of the engine bays of the 456, 550, 575, and 599 tell me that only the F133f engine in the 612 has this feature.

For context, here's a parts diagram of the 612's complete intake system:

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Air enters the intake through the MAF, the elbow, and the throttle body, located in the center of each side plenum. The six air horns located inside each side plenum conduct the air to the intake ports on the opposite side of the engine. The 12 butterflies inside the center plenum act like chimneys in the intake runners. As shown in my photo, they are spring loaded to stay open. The black cylindrical device with the rod sticking out of it, located at the front of the intake base -- the "actuator" -- is connected to a vacuum hose. This hose goes to a valve located on the driver side of the engine bay. Also connected to this valve is a hose attached to the front of the driver side plenum. (Another hose attached to this valve services the four secondary air system valves mounted to the exhaust manifolds.) When the throttle body is at less than wide open throttle, there will be a vacuum in the driver side plenum. This vacuum will travel out to the valve and back to the actuator. The vacuum will cause the actuator to retract its rod. The rod is attached to a bell crank that closes the 12 butterflies. Under WOT, when the vacuum goes away, the spring on the butterflies forces them open. Each intake runner then gets the same air flow as the other 11.

Of the 456, 550, 575, 612, and 599, only the 612 has the actuator and bell crank at the front of the intake. That's why I say only the 612 has this airflow balancing system.

 

After I had disassembled my intake I was describing my car's hidden "chimneys," and their butterfly valves, to the owner of Team III Wheels/E-T Mags, whose shop is nearby. He said told me they must be a variable intake runner system. @tazandjan confirms this to be the case

When I got home I looked up parts diagram #15, "Pneumatic Actuator System. Here it is:

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What we can see is that the vacuum feed from the driver side intake plenum is connected to a vacuum accumulator tank (#1 in the drawing), and that vacuum sourcing to the butterflies' actuator is controlled by a solenoid-operated valve. This suggests that the ECUs control the operation of the butterflies; that it's not a passive system controlled by throttle position alone. Interesting.

I get it that a shorter intake runner will increase peak output, while a longer intake runner increases low-end torque. Back in the '60s, when I bought my first two-stroke Japanese bike (a Hodaka; there's a name lost to antiquity), we could see this: that the dirt bikes had long intake runners between the carb and the engine, while on street bikes the connector was as short as could be. What I don't get is how the chimneys on the 612's intake runners can add airflow to the intake ports. This is because the only inlets into the central intake plenum, where the chimneys live, are the 12 butterflies themselves. I guess at wide open throttle, with the butterflies also wide open, the long intake runners serving the cylinders whose intake valves are closed continue to be exposed to the outside world through the throttle body, and that the additional air present in these runners is available to cylinders whose intake valves are open.

Another fun fact to know and share is something I've seen described as the fifth cycle of the four cycle engine. In a normally aspirated engine, when an exhaust pulse travels down its primary exhaust path and hits the wider opening where multiple primaries come together -- for example, the collector in an equal length header -- there's a pressure drop. This pressure drop travels back up the primary to the exhaust valve. If the intake valve is also open when this low pressure pulse hits -- what we call overlap -- it pulls additional fuel-air mixture into the cylinder. This results in a bigger reaction and increased cylinder pressure; what is happening when the ol' butt dyno feels an engine "tune" at mid to high revs.

Back to diagram #15: That vacuum feed to the brake booster is the craziest I've ever seen. The vacuum sources are fittings at the back of each side intake plenum. I circled them in red in the drawing. Vacuum from both sides comes together at the 3-way union numbered 20 in the drawing. But along the way each tube passes also through a valve which evidently bleeds off some of the vacuum to the intake elbows. Why? What is the purpose of this complexity?

While I'm geeking out, here is a photo of the underside of the intake base. The vacuum hoses that I've decorated with yellow arrows are part of the secondary air system. The direction of the arrows indicates the direction of the intake vacuum that's pulling on this system. Referring back to Drawing #15, we see that the source of this vacuum is the same accumulator tank which services the actuator which controls the 12 intake butterflies. As with the butterfly actuator, this vacuum is also controlled with a solenoid operated valve. This vacuum system terminates in four hoses which sprout from between the intake runners and are attached to the four secondary air valves, evidently to control the flow of air from the smog pump into the four exhaust headers.

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The black wiring harness attached to the intake base is for the 12 fuel injectors. You can see the two black connectors for the injector harness at the top of the photo.

I really appreciate Ferrari's efforts to keep the engine bay free of the clutter of these systems, but it sure makes repairs a lot harder. The reason I had to remove the intake base is that a 3-way connector that's part of the PCV system is made of plastic and that it had disintegrated from heat and age. Two of the components connected to this connector are tubes running to the intake elbows on each side. Their disconnection from the PCV system does not cause a vacuum leak, because they're upstream from the throttle bodies. But they do allow unfiltered air into the intake tract. A problem your car may or may not have (but probably does).

 

Let's start with parts diagram #22, titled "Blow-By System." I've put a purple dotted line around the plastic 3-way connector that turned up broken in my car. I've marked with red arrows the three lines which meet at this connector. The two transverse lines go to the intake elbows on each side. The third line heads rearward then turns right to connect to the oil tank filler neck. This system appears to be a vent between the oil tank and the outside world.

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The lines with the green arrows originate with fittings at the base of each side intake plenum, downstream of the throttle bodies. This makes them vacuum lines. They meet at a 3-way connector, with the third line connected to the oil tank filler neck. The vacuum these lines supply are what makes the positive crankcase ventilation ("PCV") system positive. The vents from the crankcase originate at fittings at the front of each valve cover. The third line, which I've marked with a blue arrow, attaches to the PCV valve. The PCV valve is a one-way check valve, intended to stop a flame front from a backfire from traveling through the green vacuum lines into the crankcase and causing a detonation of the fumes in there.

Here are some pictures of the broken three-way connector from my car. The first photo shows the entire plumbing system that I've marked with red arrows on Drawing #22, plus the intake elbows. The vantage point is the opposite of Drawing #22. Here the top of the photo is the front of the engine, with the driver side on the left.

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This photo shows the broken 3-way connector and the three lines up close. You can see from the fluted deformations to the ends of the three lines that the connector originally penetrated about one inch into each line. We can see that the line from the intake elbow on the driver side, and the line heading to the oil tank filler neck, have screw type hose clamps. The line from the passenger side does not. I assume this oversight occurred at the factory. In any event, a hose clamp is no good when the connector that it's supposed to be clamping has broken off. I believe this system is normally intended to be under negative pressure, pulling air out of the intake elbows. But when the 3-way connector broke, there was no longer any vacuum in the lines to the intake elbows. Rather, the two transverse lines would have been supplying unfiltered air to the intake tract on each side. I expect one could live with this condition without too much solid material traveling from the engine valley into the engine, but it is best to fix the leakages and prevent this entirely.

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Here is a closeup of what's left of the 3-way connector:

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Here's a closeup of the fixture at the intake elbow end on the passenger side tube. The silver nipple on the elbow inserts into the larger of the two holes in the fixture. The long black plastic part of the fixture slides into a bracket on the bottom of the elbow, securing the nipple to the hole.

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Here's a photo of the connector from the oil tank filler neck:

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There is another broken part in my car's PCV system: a hard plastic tube leading to the PCV valve from a 3-way connector at the valve cover on the driver side. In Drawing #22 I put a blue arrow on this tube. From the factory the hard plastic tube lives inside the black mesh thing that's lying next to it in the photo.

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Other 612 owners can check for similar breakage in their cars by simply wiggling that black mesh. If there's any movement, the hard plastic tube inside is broken. You can see in my photo that two of the three prongs of the 3-way connector are broken as well. You can check for this on your car by pulling on each of the tubes which come together at this connector.

FYI, Ferrari sells the three-way system which connects the intake elbows to the oil tank filler neck as a single part, PN 204265. Maranello Classic Parts wants £209.99 for this part. Ferrari likewise sells the three-way system from the valve covers to the PCV valve as a single part, PN 206039. Maranello wants £209.99 for this part as well. That's $286 USD apiece. Needless to say, I will be repairing mine rather than going for new parts.

By the way, I recently filled a shopping cart at Eurospares, my former "go-to." The cart was about $200, but shipping and duties tripled that amount: about $600 for a thermostat, a PCV valve, 24 fuel injector o-rings, and some hose clamps. Crazy!