Dick Shine of Shine Racing puts the finishing touches on our 914's two-liter boxer.
Among those touches were a Web cam.
Work on our Project 914 has finally commenced—in a big way. With the Ro-Spit and vintage racer TR3 complete, the majority of our attention will now turn to the 914. We recently spent the better part of a week at Shine Racing Services in Walpole, Mass.
While at Shine, we bead blasted and painted the myriad of tin pieces that make up the cooling system on a 914 engine. We also watched, took photos and assisted as proprietor Dick Shine expertly assembled our 2.0-liter engine. Shine has been building these engines since these cars were new, first as a Porsche dealer mechanic and then as an independent shop technician. To say that he knows these engines is a major understatement, as he built ours to completion without ever once needing to open a shop manual.
We chose Shine to build our engine because, in addition to his knowledge and skill with these engines, he shared our ideas and beliefs concerning these engines and our project. First and foremost, Shine (as well as most top 914 experts today) understands and believes in the original Bosch D-Jetronic fuel injection. Yes, he admits that fuel injection has advanced a bit in 30 years, but he believes (as do we) that an expert can make almost any fuel injection perform better than aftermarket carb kits.
We were also out to build a modest, nearly stock engine using as many original or at least high quality German components as possible. Our goal is to make between 110 and 120 horsepower and still have complete streetability and drivability. The plan was to take a stock 2.0-liter and balance and blueprint every component. We will also replace the U.S.-spec pistons and liners with European Mahle pieces which bump compression up nearly 1/2 a point from 7.6:1 to 8.0:1. In otherwise stock form, this modification should raise horsepower from 95 to 100 (DIN). To this basic configuration, we added a mild Web cam, incredibly well-ported heads from Import Machine Service and a few fuel injection and tuning tweaks.
Soon we will be running our new engine on a dyno and determining if our goals have been met. We will also be trying several tuning tricks: comparing popular 914 exhaust systems, electronic ignition versus stock ignition and fuel injection and air intake modifications.
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