So if you have read anything about our background, you’ll have seen that this all started with me working on club member’s cars in our driveway, way before we had a garage. I spent 1988-1997 working on my Ph.D. working full time in IT as a programmer and later systems administrator, and when I got my degree I had time on my hands.
Forward to 1999. I had become friends with a guy who would become my constant mentor, Paul Schwarz, a well known Porsche wrench in the West Chester, PA area at his shop, Cyntex. Paul’s something like a month older than me and has been working on Porsches professionally since his teens. Paul had been helping me out here and there, and I occasionally sourced parts for him, his BlauCarrera became available and we made a deal I got the car with no engine and some assistance installing one for a package price.
At this point I had agreed to install a 964 engine into a race car I was building (Project BM). Through a turn of events we ended up with a spare 3.6 so we decided to put that in the BlauCarrera.
I bought the flywheel from a guy in Germany who was referred to me by my supplier, bought a wiring harness from (THE OTHER GUYS) and set to it. Several calls to the supplier of the harness got me nowhere, and after three weeks I finally cobbled together all the parts to make it work. What a nightmare! No one had info and at that point I decided no one else needed to go through that hell, so I decided to put together a kit.
As it turns out, Dougherty Automotive, in West Chester PA had built the first 964 harnesses and had no problem with me producing them, so we set in on that. Next we figured out how to replicate produce the changes and reinforcements to the engine crossmember (an original design), sheet metal, and scrounged parts from all over the place, using the factory RS fan pulley, power steering block-offs we designed and had Stomski Racing produce; fuel lines were made with Coline swedged on connectors (Porsche’s supplier, which happens to be in Phoenixville, PA) and we adapted filters, oil lines, etc. in order to produce a comprehensive kit, complete with what is now a 30+ page install manual. The goal of the kit was to include all parts needed, and make it completely reversible, with no mods to the chassis or need for parts from the previous engine.
Our second conversion was on a 1973 based 993 race car, and our third on my wife’s 72. Haven’t looked back since. We can do an install in a day and, if you read the history of the Tealamonster, you’ll find out we did one overnight between track days, with the track being VIR, 340 miles each way!
A few years later we developed exhaust systems, oil systems and other parts in order to support our business.
As of 2022 we have about 300 kits in the field including maybe 70 used crate motors and another 50 rebuilt. We are still plugging away strong. We just completed a conversion of a 2005 GT3 with a 2010 997 GT3 Engine. That involved disabling the exhaust cam variable timing, and fitting many earlier parts, rerouting ECU signals, and tuning to allow the original 996 GT3 DME and harness to manage the later engine. While we were at it we developed a complete 2″ primary long tube exhaust system and managed a bit over 450 HP, up from the 386 the car was delivered with.
This exhaust is not a one-off, we designed it to be compatible with the earlier air-cooled 911 chassis and also 997+ GT3 center outlet muffler and a 49-state emissions legal catalyst.
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