Porsche 928 Repair Rennsport Kansas City

Jul 17 2012 porschedoc 928 No Comments

Ewwwwwww 928! Donkey came in the other day for some desperate last minute repairs before heading to Wichita for the 928 owner’s convention. The last 12 running 928’s in the US were in attendance 🙂 I know, bad humor. When a 928 is running, they are awesome cars. They are just very expensive to maintain, so a lot of them have fallen into disrepair unfortunately. There is a saying that 95% of 928’s are still on the road today, the other 5% actually made it home. I love 928 humor.

Actually, when I said that Donkey came to the shop, that was a bit of a lie. Actually, my good friend Scott dropped Donkey off at the house the night before. I think the conversation went something like this.

Scott: “Yea, the A/C just quit working, so take a quick peek at it and see if you can figure it out….but don’t spend much time on it…..hahahaha.”
Me: “Uh….were you just laughing?”
Scott: “No, I had something in my throat. heheheh”
Me: “Was that another laugh?”
Scott: “Absolutely not, i’m sure it’s something simple, it was just working….giggity”

I was to drive the car over to the shop the next morning, spend an hour, if it was a big deal, then don’t worry about it. Unfortunately, I think my friends know me better than that. Now, fast forward to the following morning, when I am commuting to the shop, and come to a dead stop on I35 due to an accident. In a construction zone with no shoulders, and no exit for about 2 miles, she started to overheat as we were moving about a foot a minute. After 40 minutes of the needle being borderline red, Donkey couldn’t take anymore and spit out some coolant from the over flow and shut off. After that she wouldn’t restart. Typical fuel vapor lock. Luckily, we had gotten just far enough that I was able to push it out of the center lane and over to the shoulder behind some construction cones. And then I sat and waited. Over an hour later the tow truck was finally able to get to me and we loaded it up and headed to the shop.

One thing I noticed when I left the house was that the alternator was not charging consistently. Ohm meter showed about 10 volts, which wasn’t good, so I put in a new alternator. 928’s have problems with overheating the alternator due to the location, and the cooling hose was not attached to it’s duct, so that may be part of it’s demise.

After some work, the alternator was out.

And the new alternator in place.

Then it was time to replace some of the torn ducting hose. The hose runs through the brake cooling duct (uh…..), then up to the driver side fender.

Backside of the fender panel where the hose attaches.

Old hose.

And the new SCAT hose. Note to Dave…..that’s SCAT, not CATS. No furry creatures were harmed in the making of this blog post.

After getting the starting issues sorted, we charged up the A/C system. Our dye immediately pointed to a hole in the front condensor. Since we figured a full A/C system revamp would be needed in the future, we added a little red devil sealant and continued to charge it. Sent it home and it made the round trip with a working A/C system!

So cliff notes:
1. 928’s are awesome.
2. My friends hate me.

Yup, that about sums it up, lol.

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