I Filled my Cheap Porsche 911 Engine with Laundry Soap

We are going to put Shout into the motor. I want you to see this right here. All right there she goes. Now it's just a matter of opening these valves and letting it into the system and we should be able to watch that hose expand. There she goes and it's going to quickly start sucking this mixture up and when it gets to zero it's supposed to be full. What's going on ladies and gentlemen welcome back to Auto Auction Rebuilds and today we're going to talk about the one main thing wrong with the extremely cheap Porsche 911 996 that we picked up from Copart for $7,800 out the door. Now I know it seemed like it was too good to be true and it just possibly was. Now there's a lot there's a lot going on here. There are a couple issues but the main issue today is well I'm just going to show you. So of course if you just walk around the car take a look at it there's really nothing physically wrong with the car. It's actually quite beautiful. It has the gorgeous aero package. It's got the nice chrome twist wheels I think is what they call them. It's a beautiful beautiful car. The color is gorgeous. I absolutely love this color and it runs and drives absolutely perfect. You couldn't fault this car at all. Well except for this one little thing but to find out what it is we're going to have to pop the hood. Looks like it may have already been popped. Now I already fixed a couple things on this one of them being the frunk and the hood pistons the shock absorbers. I went ahead and fixed those. Now the first problem that we have with this car is the alternator is dead. Alternator I know. So listen in Oklahoma a lot of people say things a little bit differently. A lot of times we call it an alternator. Alright it's an alternator. Y'all hear me? Alternator. Okay so aside from the alternator what is wrong with the 996? I'm going to show you something. First I'll make sure there's no pressure on this because I did have it running just a moment ago. It looks like she's good. Have a look at this cap real quick and tell me tell me what you see. What does that look like to you? It looks like oil. That's what it looks like to me. Okay let's take off the oil cap see if anything looks bad under here. No everything looks fine with the oil cap. Now I'm no expert on Porsches but I'm pretty certain we're not supposed to have coolant and oil mixing together in the reservoir. Now the oil looks perfectly fine. It's full. There's nothing wrong with the oil. So what I see here is oil mixing into the coolant but coolant not mixing into the oil. Now I don't know how well I can get you all in here. It's a real tight fit. In fact I'm betting I probably can't get you any further than this. So that's about as good as I can do. I'm going to hold you guys there while I pop out this, I probably should have popped this cover out to begin with. I'm going to take this little intake tube out and I'm going to squeeze the upper radiator hose. I'm going to see if we can get some of that nice milky substance moving around so you can see it. I'm squeezing it. I just don't know if you can see it or not. I can stick my finger in here though and pull this out and you see how thick this is? I mean to me this looks more like oil than coolant and it is very thick. I mean very thick. You see that? That's oil. So we have a ton of oil in the coolant and that is a massive problem. So changing the alternator in this car is actually a very simple process. I ordered a new one from Amazon. That was like 140 bucks. It's running extremely late. It was supposed to have been here three or four days ago. It hasn't shown up yet. It's very simple. You pop this oil fill tube up like this. There's a bolt here, a couple screws, a mass air flow sensor, and this whole assembly just comes out. You push this out of your way. That gives you access to your belt tensioner and everything. You take the belt tensioner out which is actually a idler I think. Maybe it's the tensioner. Maybe it's the idler. I don't remember. There's a bolt that runs through this pulley right here through the alternator. You simply take that out. You take the bolt on the bottom off. There's one on the back side and a plug and the alternator literally just twists and pulls out. It's very simple to do. The alternator is the easy part. The coolant mixing with oil in the cooling system however, that could become very complicated and very very costly. That's what we're going to talk about real quick. Luckily, the title still had the last owner's name on it. I was able to look him up on Facebook and ask him why this car was at Copar. Why it was so cheap? What did he know about it? What he told me is he was a very nice guy, very kind. He loved this car. He has a lot of Porsches. I think that's how you pronounce it. He has a lot of Porsches. I don't think he's so mechanical. He has people that take care of that stuff for him. The story that he told me was as follows. He took the Porsche to Bob Moore up in Edmond where they did an oil change. He did not drive this car very often. I mean a few thousand miles a year. He's owned the car for over 10 years. About 10 miles after an oil change, he said the engine blew up in this car. It ended up becoming a drawn-out battle with Bob Moore and his lawyers. Eventually, Bob Moore settled to put a new engine in his car. The car went into Bob Moore wherever it was that they decided to put this motor. Most likely, it was Bob Moore. They have a big service center there. They swapped out the engine. He said he drove the car about a thousand miles. Like I said, this is a guy that would only drive this car maybe 3,000 or so miles in a year. It took a while before he realized there was a problem. When the alternator went bad, he took it into a guy that he uses to do stuff like this. The guy checked it, did the diagnosis, and was just basically going over the rest of the car for him when he noticed there was oil in the coolant. Believe it or not, I have spent the last week or so doing a lot of research on this car, on the Boxster and the 911. As it turns out, this is a very common issue. These Porsches are... Sam Crack, sorry to tell you, buddy, but man, if you don't have problems with it yet, you're probably going to at some point down the road. This is a very common issue. The head's cracking is absolutely notorious. A lot of people think it's only 99s that have this problem. No, it's 99 to 05, man. These things have a horrible, horrible problem with cracking the heads. It's just one of the many problems with it, along with the intermediate shaft bearings going bad and blowing up the engine. It's a car that if you're going to fix this, you should really just do it right. Send it off to, I think, LN Performance or something. They do all the work on this. They can fix these heads. They do the intermediate shaft bearings, all the notorious stuff that fails on these. The thing is, this is where things are confusing. His mechanic told him there's oil in the coolant and it's going to cost about $10,000 to fix. Now, I'm going to be honest with you. I've looked at this car and retail value on this car is around $20,000. I'm into it for about $8,000 right now. If we put $10,000 into it and had the motor done and repaired, we'd be into it for $18,000. That's not so bad. I mean, at least we're not taking a loss yet, but the issue that I'm faced with is I'm not convinced that this motor is bad. The problem is, is the guy that traded it into a dealership and the dealership in turn sent it off to Copart. He does not really know all that much about the engines of these cars, so he doesn't know if the oil mixing with the coolant happened when the last engine blew up and Bob Moore put a motor in this and didn't bother flushing the system properly and left all of that contaminated oil or all that contaminated coolant in the cooling system. Obviously, they had to drain it, but draining and filling it. This car holds six gallons of coolant, so there was a ton of oil mixed into the heater core, both front radiators, all of the hoses. So, just changing the engine out is not going to be sufficient to get this cooling system cleaned out. So, this is kind of where I am totally blown away and stuck. I don't know what to do. This engine could be perfectly fine. There may be absolutely nothing wrong with the motor at all. This may just be residual oil that was left in the cooling system from Bob Moore changing the engine. Obviously, they weren't happy about replacing the motor. Maybe they just didn't care and they just tossed an engine in here and sent it down the road and now it's here. Alternatively, they could have put in a used engine that had an issue with a cracked head or it could have cracked the head within a thousand miles that the gentleman that owned this car had driven it since it was repaired. It's really just hard to say. What I do know is before we get too far in this, the first thing we need to do is drain this coolant oil mixture out of it. We got to get this out of the car. I'm going to flush it with a water hose. I know a lot of people are going to be blown away. I'm actually going to tap water in this. I'm not wasting any money. I've already contacted FCP Euro and I've asked them if they would like to do a little collaborating, maybe do some sponsored content to help me out on the price of this stuff. Before I've even heard back from them yet, I've already purchased three gallons of genuine Porsche coolant for this. I've already purchased a 160 degree thermostat instead of the 180 for this, which is a highly recommended replacement. I've already gotten to the point where I'm buying parts. There's also a special bleeder that I'll show you right now. It's in the front and that was about $150. So I've already started spending money on this car. I think that's the point I'm trying to make here. I'm hopeful. Well, see how fast that sucker came up with the new shocks. This is called the air lift. It runs off of a 90 PSI compressor and this is how you vacuum bleed your cooling system. You actually fill your coolant with this. I know it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but this is a special tool. You hook up to your air compressor and there's a hose, obviously, that you stick into this with a valve to open and close it. You put a vacuum on your cooling system and then you stick the end of the hose into the coolant, basically a big bucket or something that you're going to fill this up with, all kinds of adapters and stuff so that it'll fit your specific reservoir, coolant reservoir. Once you put a vacuum on it, you open that valve and it literally sucks. The vacuum will suck the coolant right into the engine and it prevents you from having airlock in your motor, which can destroy an engine. This is an absolute necessity for one of these cars. A car like this almost has to have it. Next, it was another $130 for this piece. Bet you guys don't know what this is, but this is the headlight switch. The headlight switch on this car is bonkers. Sometimes the headlights come on, sometimes they don't. Sometimes the headlights do come on and all the lights will come on, but this one won't. But then another time, it'll be this one that won't. And sometimes if you play with it enough, all the lights will come on. The headlight switch is bad. I've already tried cleaning it with electrical cleaner and it didn't do any good. Oh, I left one of the old struts under here, didn't I? Or that's one of the new ones. That's a new one, an extra one that I got. So we got to put that on and that is where we're at. This could be a real disaster or it could be a diamond in the rough. You know what I mean? If the oil in the coolant is from the previous engine, this could be phenomenal. It could be a matter of flushing this thing out really well, taking care of it, and it might be good for a long time to come. But then again, this could have a cracked head at which point I don't know where we're going to go from there. What I can tell you is the first thing we need to do is get under there and get the coolant out of it. We need to flush as much of this crap out as we can into a bucket and maybe we can take a better look at what it looks like as it's coming out. So let's probably get the back end in the air, maybe able to do it without getting it up in the air. I don't know. Let's get some of this coolant out and see where we go from there. So to get started, I've got a pretty good size drain pan that I typically use for motor oil. I don't know how many quarts. This is a 16 quart, so hopefully this will hold and I'm hoping that I don't have to get the car up in the air. It looks like we should be able to get to it from right here and I'm going to try to get you guys as close up as I can. I'm going to use a T30 for this job and it seems most people say not to try to use this bolt. Most people seem to say that they can't get it on there and you got to take off this lower hose. It's already starting to leak, so I'm going to say that is a win, except that I can't get the drain pan under it. I got to jack it up a little bit first. Slide this under here and let's see what comes out. It's not going to be pretty. We're getting to a point now where we're starting to see oil coming out. I don't know how well you can see it, but there's definitely some real thick goo that it's occasionally pouring out of this thing. It's like the coolant stops for a minute and then the oil starts flowing. There it is again. So my goal right now is just to let this thing drain. There it is. Let's get as much of this out of here as we can and then I'm going to fill it with water and I'm just going to push water through this thing multiple times. I'll probably end up disconnecting this water hose, coolant hose right here. I think that'll make this a much faster job, but I'm going to let it drain through here for a while. We'll push some water through it and we'll see what comes out here in a moment. So this will give you a little better idea as to what is actually in the engine. Coolant. I accidentally spilled just a little bit on the ground. I'll go get a rag and clean this up, but you can see how much oil is mixed in with this. That's a lot. I took off the lower pipe and hose down there and we're going to get started pushing water through it. So round one, here's what we got into the pan or the bucket. That's pretty gnarly, man. Pretty gnarly. She's pretty full. I'm going to dump it into this bucket and we're just going to keep running a water hose through it and we'll see what this looks like in the bucket once we're finished. All right, boys and girls, it has gotten dark on us, but we've got the compressor set at about 100 psi. We want this gauge, and I know this gauge is hard to see, to pull a vacuum all the way over from the red into the green over here around 25. We want it to hold that for approximately 20 seconds according to the directions. So we're going to plug up the air compressor. We're going to open the valve and we should see hoses collapsing. And as long as it can hold a vacuum for 20 seconds or so, there's no leaks in the system and everything should be good to go. So let's plug this on, open that valve, and let's see what happens. All right, the compressor just kicked on. We've got it on. We're going to open this valve and you should see that gauge moving. I know it's hard to see, maybe impossible to see, but she's moving. There's five. She's up to 10, quickly approaching 15. So far, so good. I can hear the cooling system gurgling. Oh, look at that. Look at the hose compressing. Look at it collapse. Oh, that is awesome. We're up to 20. We've got five more to go. Man, you ever seen anything like that? Look how it just smashed that hose down, man. Totally collapsed it. That's kind of cool. And we are approaching 25. Here she goes. Come on, man, you can do it. You can do it. I hear some gurgling going on here. We are quickly approaching that 25 mark. I don't know. She seems to be hovering just above 25. Let's see if we lock this down and we'll hold it. Nah, it seemed like it lost a little bit there. It's holding at about 23, 24. Let's open it back up. There she goes. There she goes. She's pulling 25. Close, close, close. Let's make sure this adapter is sealed in there real good. I mean, she's at like 24.9. And when you close the valve, it looks like it's holding. We may just be a little low on air from the compressor. Like I said, the compressor did turn on. So we'll let it boost up for a minute and we'll come back and see if this thing will hold vacuum. OK, so this may not be the best way of doing things, but it's what I got to work with right now. It's holding at about 26. It hasn't moved in several minutes. We now have the new adapter. This is for sucking up the coolant. You see it has a screen on it to help keep large stuff from getting into your system. I'm going to use this cooler and I'm going to set this cooler up as high as I can. This is as good as I can do. And it says to start with half of a 60 ounce bottle of Shout. And apparently this is just going to be one of those things. We are going to put Shout into the motor. I want you to see this right here. All right, there she goes. All right, that's about half of the bottle. Put that back down there. I'm going to put more water in this and we're going to start filling this up and we will suck this into the cooling system using the vacuum that's already on the engine. So give me just a minute to fill this up and I'm going to show you guys exactly how we're going to do this. OK, so here's the Shout mix. I want to take the tube and you want to make sure the tube stays at the bottom and does not come up because if it does, you're going to have a lot of problems. So I want to fill down here. Yeah, the tube is sitting at the bottom of the bucket. Hey, the engine is going to smell real good when we're done with it. Now it's just a matter of opening these valves and letting it into the system. And we should be able to watch that hose expand. There she goes. And it's going to quickly start sucking this mixture up. And when it gets to zero, it's supposed to be full. So again, it started coming up. I'm going to hold it down with one hand here and I'm going to open this back up. And as it starts running low, we'll turn it off and we'll put more water back in it. And she sucks this stuff up real fast, boys. This is wild. I've never seen anything like this before. I'm going to turn this off again. I want to check the level. We've still got a little bit more in here. So we're going to open it up again. This has got to be the easiest way I have ever seen to fill a cooling system. Now that we're done, we're going to turn this knob counterclockwise, which will help release it from the coolant reservoir here. And we should be able to just slide it right out just like that. And have a look at this, boys. I don't know how well you can see in there, but she's full. I don't even have to fill it up. Look at this right at the top. Nice soapy water. It's not full of oil this time. So we're going to put that cap on. We're going to run it for a while and we'll have to come back in another video after I do this a few times and see if we have a cracked head on this. It's not going to be a head gasket on these 911s. Head gaskets never fail. It's going to be a cracked head or it's going to be residual oil in the coolant from the last engine. Fingers are crossed. All right, ladies and gentlemen, that's going to wrap it up. I hope you enjoyed this episode over here at Auto Auction Rebuilds. It's something new. I know that a lot of you are not interested in the Porsche. You've made that loud and clear, but there are others that are. And I'm interested in learning how to work on this thing and learning about it because I don't know anything about it. I've never owned one before. And so far, it's a bittersweet experience. Now, when the thing's out on the road driving, it is an absolute blast. I've never driven a car that handles the way this car does. I've driven a Miata. I've driven several Miatas, in fact, and I've never driven a car that was this nimble, that was just this responsive and this much in control. I mean, this thing owns the road. I love driving it. Unfortunately, we have a puddle of laundry detergent water pouring out from underneath the center pan of the car. So I don't know what runs up under there. I'm sure it's going to be like a heater hose or something running into the heater core, possibly the heater core itself. I don't know. All I know is that there is definitely something leaking pretty badly out from under there. So we're just going to save that for another day. I took it out. I ripped on a little bit. Man, I was having fun. You've got to get it up to operating temperature. That's the thing. It's got to hit like 180, 185 degrees to really start cleaning the gunk out of the cooling system. Well, as we're cleaning gunk out of the cooling system, it looks like something popped. So we're going to have to figure out what that is in another episode. I'm going to keep running this stuff through here. I'm going to do my best to bring this car back to life and find out if it has a head gasket problem. Sorry, not a head gasket. These things never pop head gaskets. If it has a cracked head or if this was just residual leftover, you comment below and tell me what you think. Some of you are probably experts at these cars and you've seen this a million times, but this is kind of a rare situation where the gentleman told me it was blown up by the dealership. The dealership replaced the engine and then within a thousand miles later, there's oil in the water. Well, like I said earlier, this could be just residual oil left over from the previous engine. And if so, it could be a win. It could. Alternatively, they could have replaced it with a bad motor. I guess time will tell, but do me a favor, comment below, tell me what you think. If you're enjoying following along with this Porsche and the woes of owning it, give this video a big thumbs up. And you want to know what you can do to really help support this channel, please share this video, share it on your Facebook account, share it on Twitter, just share this video. I would truly appreciate it. Follow me on Instagram, Auto Auction Rebuilds. I'm going to get out of here. It's been a long night. It's still really hot outside and I am kind of bummed because we are leaking, but I hope that we're going to get it right. So stay tuned for the next one, folks. We're going to get out of here. I will catch you all very soon in the next one.