Last weekend my friend and fellow SOC member Jjr was supposed to pick me up in his all original '73 1.7 914 to go pick up some parts for his Manx buggy resto. On the way here and going up a hill he felt a loud thump and then the car started to lose power and stumble finally coming to a stop. He tried cranking it over and it would run briefly but very poorly and then die; you could hear some loud noises coming from the right side of the car (cylinders 3 & 4, since the car is mid-engined and the motor is looking towards the back).
Today we took off the valve cover on that side and found the rocker arm for the exhaust valve on cylinder 4 broken as well as some bent wire (there's some wire that somehow fits the rocker arm assemblies, which are two per head as opposed to Type I's which are one per head). When taking off the rocker arm assemblies on that side we also found the spring for that valve at rest (not compressed); of course we suspect that valve is broken and I tried to pull out the broken stem along with the spring and retainer but somehow it's stuck in the guide. I can still move it back and forth but up to a point. The car was not smoking when that happened so we think that maybe the piston didn't get broken but we are anticipating a full re-build since the car has over 105,000 miles on it (the odometer broke then and all service records from the Porsche dealerships concurr with that info. so we certainly know that the car has more miles on it than indicated). The car was running 20W-50 Mobil I synthetic oil and it looks really clean. What's your verdict here? What could've happened?
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