I recently got the dreaded check-engine light associated with camshaft deviation. The car is a 2001 base model (2.7) with about 135K miles. I've owned the car for about 5 years.
Of course it occurs just before my car's inspection is due. So I plugged in the Durometric tool, which showed the code P1341 (Porsche fault code 174 -camshaft adjustment bank 1 below limit value.)
After the car was warm, I used the Durametric to activate the camshaft solenoids while at idle.
- When I activated the bank 1 solenoid, nothing happened.
- When I activated the bank 2 solenoid, the engine's idle got very rough.
Next I took the Durometric and started data logging and took the car through my test loop, which is about 50% secondary roads, and 50% highway with a couple of engine pulls to redline on the entrance ramps.
I pulled the data out to Excel to see what is going on. First I compared the two camshaft positions to the the engine's RPM.
Than I compared the 2 sides to each other by subtracting the cam2 angle from the cam1 angle for each data point.
In both cases, it seams clear that camshaft 1 is generally about 2-3 degrees higher than camshaft 2, especially when they jump to the ~23 degree setting. Also the "Camshaft position 1 deviation" is obviously about -9.66 degree, but that seems to be more of a flag value that is set rather than a specific measurement. It stayed consistent throughout the test across all of the different engine conditions. The camshaft position 2 deviation is -3.86 degrees, and also consistent in all phases of operation.
Never the less, it seems like the camshaft 1 solenoid system isn't working (given the test at idle)
Is it possible and worth-while to replace bank-1 solenoid actuator to see if that fixes the problem, before I start down the path of pulling the engine and replacing all of the chains, rails, etc?