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Marky's 996 ownership thread.

Hi JS,
My mate Craig got us both a pair of condensers a while back. I've just text him for a link as they've gone from my eBay list now.

The rads are from here -

https://www.adrad.co.uk/car-radiator/catalogue.php?manu=PORSCHE&model=911&engine=&year=1998

They are £59.59 all in but they are local to me so I saved the £5 +vat for delivery off each rad so mine came to £107.
Quality looks great and they're an established company, but time will tell obviously.

I stumbled across a Porsche place having a clear out for my waterpump.
They are about £270 from the main dealers.
Beware though that every man and his dog are listing things as OE these days.
I messaged loads of sellers claiming their pumps were OE genuine suppliers etc yet most came back saying "Metal impeller" which the Porsche ones weren't.

I would only settle for a Porsche part in a Porsche box. It's not worth buying an unknown for the sake of saving £100 or so. It's an important part. :thumb:

I'll update with a link to the air con rads if I find out where they're from.


Edited to add -

https://www.ebay.co.uk/i/171447646092


They're £10 more now than when we bought them. £79 per pair.
 
WARNING - Long post, pic heavy!!

Feel free to skim through. ;)

I'd forgotten some of this may have been covered in the last couple of posts but hey ho, just ignore it.


Righto, the car is now at my indy for a boat load of work. No particular faults, simply all of the preventative work I want done for peace of mind.

I've owned the car for almost 2 years now and can finally get stuck in and hopefully have it mechanically sound and looking like how I want for next spring. There'll still be projects such as interior (bucket seats, cup wheel, new belts, etc) and a full suspension overhaul, the latter of which won't be getting done until next winter (12 months time).

I'll report on all my Indy's stuff in a couple of weeks when I get it back, before it went down though I figured I'd 'quickly" swap my rads and condensers for the new ones. That would leave the water pump and LTT to my indy along with re-gassing the air-con.

As is usually the way though with 20 year old cars, I found the usual seized fasteners and a few areas of corrosion here and there.

knowing i was working to a timescale I was tempted to just swap the parts I set out to change and revisit things in the spring, but my OCD got the better of me so I got stuck in sorting things out.

There are loads of guides on bumper and rad removal so I wont do a step by step.
Basically Youtube and Pelican Parts are your friend and it's all fairly self explanatory as you strip the car.

So first of all get the front end of the car up in the air. This aids access and keeps most of the coolant in the system towards the rear of the car.





A quick look in the ducts -




Ducts removed -







Nearside condenser -




Offside Condenser -




I reckon there's a few years left in those. :grin:

It's always nice to find everything wearing the correct date stamps. I know the car is original anyway but it's nice to have it confirmed as you strip things.




Condensers removed -




Rads were full of debris along with a strange amount of tab butts. Once cleaned off though they weren't that bad, surprisingly.

Nearside rad -




After a quick brush -




So then I removed the front wheels, wheel arch liners and dropped out the rad bracket assemblies with rads attached.

You can see the rusty rad brackets and fittings here, still on the car -






Once removed you're left with this -




And this pile of bits -


So I sorted through it and gathered a pile to go for powder coating -




So once I was at this point I could have a good poke around in the arches and around the front tub area.
All was well in the main. Original and sound, just a bit grubby -

Nearside arch -








As I've said though, there was some surface rust starting on a couple of seams, etc. You can see on the seam between the two hoses near the lower front section of the tub -




As with all modern cars the 996 has arch liners which saves a lot of crud getting into all of the nooks and crannies.
On the ares not covered by the liners though, gravel rash had taken its toll over the years.. Mainly a triangular area above the rear of the wheel and the horizontal area around the top mount.

It just looks a bit mucky -




..until you take a wire wheel to it -




The eagle eyed amongst you will see the snapped stud for the wheel arch liner nut. Soak these in WD40 before attempting to undo them. As far as snapping goes, a metal stud should win over a plastic nut, but not when it's rusted and weakened around the base.




So at this point I removed everything easy to remove from the arches, such as coolant hoses etc and attack the rust, then treat, prime and paint.

More in next part, if you're still awake. :wink:
 
So out came various wire wheels etc and I ground back any corrosion to good metal. Some areas must only be single skinned so you need to be wary of how far to go when grinding.
I couldn't get right the way in to the top mount area, so I'll revisit this when I do my suspension overhaul next winter.

Anyway nearside arch ground back -




Nearside seams on front tub ground -




Top mount area ground back -




Offside ground back. It was much better than the nearside. Probably due to less crap in the middle of the road -




At this point I ground off the snapped stud for the arch liner nut, drilled a hole and managed to get a bolt in from the back of the arch to form a new stud.




I then cleaned all other areas of the arches with Tardis to remove any deposits, then wiped it all down with IPA to ensure a clean bare finish.

I wanted to keep the factory under-seal and seam-sealer as it is still fine and to be honest it's not good to lose all originality from things unless you're doing a full resto.

Arches cleaned off -




Now it was time to treat it. Now the simple fact is where rust is concerned the only proper way to get rid of it is to cut the metal out and put new metal in. Simple as.

However, this is a huge undertaking and as you can see from my pics we are dealing with surface rust here from stone-chipping, with no holes present and no rot coming from the inside out.
So the simplest form of attack is a rust neutraliser/killer, rust inhibiting primer, then a good thick top coat.
My car sees light summer use and I'll inspect the arches every spring. I'm pretty sure I've managed to fend off the rust for a good few years and kept on top of, it should never get to that stage again.

So brush on the rust remover gel and wait for 20 minutes until it goes black. Then keep repeating until it stops changing colour -






Then when it's all cleaned off, you're left with this -




Ok, so various bits primed. You need to do this very soon after treating otherwise any moisture will render your work pointless -








Next post will be the repaint and rebuild. Cheers. :thumb:
 
So after all that, it's the topcoat of your choice.
Now the best looking solution would be to spray it body colour, but that would mean loads of masking and is a lot work given the small area you actually see once the wheel arch liner is back in.
So I went with a brush-on gloss black metal paint, fine for primed and unprimed areas. Mine was all primed by this point obviously.
Much less masking and easy to apply. There's the odd brush mark in it but to be honest it would never look flawless even if sprayed as the factory seam sealer is very textured.
I also chose where to paint up to and where to leave original, as coming back to my originality point, it can sometimes look a bit suspect when all the factory finishes have been tarted up and lost.

Nearside -




Offside -








So that was left to harden, probably between two weekends and in the meantime I gathered all the parts needed for reassembly.

Parts back from powder coating and given a quick coat of wax. The rad brackets are still a bit pitted under the powder coat but they're much better and should last for years now. -






All parts washed and Tardis'd. I also thoroughly scrubbed and rinsed out the coolant pipes I'd had coated, as you don't want grit from the shot-blasting left in there to enter your engine.
Once clean I dressed all the plastics before refitting -



Paint any small parts like clips etc. These should be sky blue but I only had royal blue. Epic clip colour fail. :grin:






Horns -




New rads + condensers -




New fixings. Porsche and Ebay. £75 from Porsche. Not much for the Bay stuff. I'll try and add links and a picture of my invoice for part numbers later.




New resistors fitted to fans. Annoyingly I lost the ones I bought last year, so I had to order another set. Good job they're cheap. -




Rad assemblies going back together. Still need to secure the resistors and fit the fan shrouds -




All finished ready to go in. -




Here's a load of finished/almost finished pics, at various stages -




Offside -












Nearside -













Ok, so that's about it. Try and ignore my rotten suspension. It ruins the look of the wheel arch areas but that will be remedied with new stuff next winter.

Obviously the car is now reassembled and down at my indy. It will come back in a couple of weeks.

Like I say I'll add a pic of my parts invoice for the parts I bought, but every car will be different so will need less or more of the stuff I bought.
I was left with 2 of each type of hose clip (pack size was more than I needed) and a good few nuts (one type) that I never needed. Apart from that I used almost everything.

I'd like to say I'm glad that job is done and I don't want to do it again anytime soon, but while my car is away my mate Craig is bringing his up for exactly the same treatment next weekend, so here we go again. :sad:

After that its refurb my callipers red and fit all new seals etc, then refurb my split rims. Then it's onto aerokit and bodyshop.

Anyway, apologies for the long post, but it shows what is involved and I like to keep a record. :wink:
 
Ooooopppppffffhhhhhh..... none genuine resistors ??? How the hell do you sleep at night ??? :grin: :grin:
 
You can go off people you know. :wack: :D

And remember, one small slip with my wire wheel and that lovely new finish on your freshly refurbed KWs is history. :chin:
 
Hahaha.... do what you want !!! Just means you'll have to have them refurb'd when I donate them to you :thumbs:
 
Epic work mark.

Having done a couple of similar scale refurbs over the years - I know how rewarding and addictive it can be! Looks really good and I love the way you are going about this project. Keep up the good work :thumbs:
 
Thanks Gixxer, I appreciate the comments.

How are you getting on with yours? Any projects on the go?
Are you taking it off the road for winter or do you use yours all year round?

Get a thread update done anyway. Always good to see what people are up to. :thumb:
 
Nice work.
The PO had done all this to my car in the last year or so. Just a case of keeping it nice now.
Anyway I have a related question, sort of....
My car has a LTT fitted, however the cooling fans only kick in some way above the thermostat temperature which seems to defeat the object of fitting a LTT in the first place. I'd say that if keeping the engine temp lower at all times is worthwhile, then the fans would want to start working sooner than the factory setting?
Or am I worrying over nothing?':dont know:'
 
Worrying over nothing....

The thermostat controls the temperature at which water starts circulating, it give a faster warm up and gives a minimum engine temp for normal running. Once the thermostat is open, in normal use, water circulates and cools in the rads with airflow from driving. When the car is stationary, there is no airflow so to prevent overheating, the fans kick in. This temp is higher than the thermostat temp or the fans would always be on once the engine had warmed up.

The fans may also come on in hot conditions or hard driving but the rads rally should be sufficient in normal driving.
 
maldren said:
Worrying over nothing....

The thermostat controls the temperature at which water starts circulating, it give a faster warm up and gives a minimum engine temp for normal running. Once the thermostat is open, in normal use, water circulates and cools in the rads with airflow from driving. When the car is stationary, there is no airflow so to prevent overheating, the fans kick in. This temp is higher than the thermostat temp or the fans would always be on once the engine had warmed up.

The fans may also come on in hot conditions or hard driving but the rads rally should be sufficient in normal driving.


Thanks. I've probably come across as dumber than I actually am. :)
My point is that although the LTT will keep the engine cooler under most normal driving conditions, whilst sat in traffic the temp will then eventually rise to the point at where the fans kick in, which will be the factory setting.
If the idea is to prevent the engine from running at normal factory settings, then the fans need to start earlier also.
 
Marky - this is brilliant; has to be one of the best threads on 911uk, ever.

Love it and will add this to the list of things to do in future....


Osh
 
I don't know how I've missed this until now :oops:
Excellent work Marky... :thumbs:
 

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