Variocam thoughts and questions

[blue62]

Originally Posted by sfkjeld

Thank you, very interesting. I recently purchased a Foxwell scanner, probably at your suggestion. I’ve used it only to clear the CEL. Are you able to see the timing change on the scanner?

I can on my scanner.
It is the Foxwell NT520 Pro

I went out and hooked it up to my 2000S so I could refresh my memory on how I do it.
I will attempt to talk you through it.

Hook up the scanner
Go to the Porsche program and hit enter.
Go to manual selection and hit enter.
Go down to 986 Boxster/Cayman hit enter.
Go to Diagnosis hit enter.
Go to control units hit enter.
Go to DME (its the top choice on my scanner) hit enter.
Go down to actual values hit enter.
Go to all data hit enter.
Now you should be looking at a list of all the data the DME sees.

With the car running you can watch all this data under different driving conditions.
You can watch all the data the DME sees in real time. You just have to learn what your looking at and what it means.
I have hooked mine up and watched various data over a 320 mile run several times.

Now go down till you see camshaft deviation for each bank
Below that is actual camshaft angles.


so if your at idle watching camshaft angle you should see changes when your Variocam timing actuator kicks in. I think that is around 1500 RPM. then I kicks back out around 5000 RPM. Not positive on those RPM's but I should be in the ballpark.
You can graph it with the graphing feature and see changes over a short period of time.
I think you can also Data log with this scanner but I have never tried it.

Now You can back out to where you found actual values and go down to
Drive links active.
Hit enter
Now you can activate your fuel injectors and your Variocam timing Actuators.
sort of a test mode.
You will hear and feel the difference when you activate the injectors or the actuators with the engine running.
Now simply activating them does not tell you that everything is within spec. but it will tell you if they function, or not.

So that is how it works with my scanner on my 2000S

Hope this helps
Let me know how you go