Need Help - Replacement Engine Problems

[cosorio]

A little background on my project: The engine went out on my '99 996 so I started looking around for a replacement engine. I found an engine from a local Porsche shop in NY that only has 8500 miles and has been stored for several years. The price was right so I bought it and had it shipped to California.

Fast forward to the problems > Installed the engine and started it. Had some smoke initially but eventually cleared up. The first thing I noticed was that there is a definite miss while idling. I placed my hand over the exhast tips and I can feel a pulsation on the left side. There is also a lot of smoke that comes out when I start revving the engine at higher rpms. The smoke disappears when idling. At this point I'm already worried about the overall health of this low mileage engine. I then performed a compression test on all cylinders and all cylinders had about 125-130 psi except of #2 which only had about 100 psi. All plugs have nice burns on them and absolutely no oil present on the spark plugs. This is why it perplexes me because if the engine is burning oil at higher rpms, then the plugs should be fouled, or at least be very dark. Likewise, if the engine has a low compression cylinder, isnt it also true that the plugs will be fouled and have oil residue on them? With all this happening, the check engine light came on and it's been flashing ever since. Of course, I dont have a reader so I have no idea what the error codes are.

Do any of you guys think I might be missing something or is this pretty much an indication of a bad engine? I would like to exhaust all avenues before I call the shop that sold me the engine and tell them the situation.

Thanks in advance.

Edited April 20, 2008 by cosorio

[cosorio]

*Update*

The engine miss turned out to be a bad injector so the car is running fine now except for a slight trace of smoke, possibly running rich. The CEL is now gone and hasnt reappeared, but without any error codes I can't determine the cause of the smoke. I might add that there is no smoke at start up and no smoke at idle. Could this be just the engine clearing itself out after years of storage? I did notice that the amount of smoke has diminished over time and is now a faint trace and hardly detectable. My only concern is passing smog with an engine running too rich.