996 Maintenance

Had a freind bring by his 996 for some winter maintenance. This was actually the Evolution motorsports prototype car for their supercharger kit they developed with VF Engineering.

First thing to do was to replace the ignition switch. The 996 and boxster are notorious for having bad ignition switches. It can rear it’s head in many different ways.
1. Key switch that is difficult to turn or seems to hang up
2. Key that rotates way more than it should
3. Odd electrical problems: AC stops working, dash lights stop working, etc.
4. Key gets stuck in the ignition

What happens is the backside of the switch wallows out and jams up in the main switch housing.

First remove the air duct under the dash.

Laying underneath (have fun if you are bigger than me 😉 ) you can see the electrical connector on the ignition switch. Pull that off.

Connector off. The arrows point to the two screws you need to back out. Normally they are covered with a red paint/wax that you have to scrap away. Also this takes an extremely skinny flat blade screwdriver bit, another fun bit to find.

Here you can see the old switch wallowed out.

Out of the housing.

Not the correct ignition switch, lol. Luckily I keep the correct ones on hand.

Then it was up in the air to install S/S brake lines and flush/bleed the brake fluid.

Old rubber brake lines.

New S/S lines.

In the middle, I changed the oil filling with LubroMoly 5w40

And back to the brake lines.

Then it was time to bleed the brakes out.

A little condesation in the oil cap.

A lot of people who do their own brakes, etc have complained about getting the wheels back on and lined up since the cars use wheel bolts instead of wheel studs. There is a very simple answer. In your toolkit, there is a long silver rod with threads on one end. Screw that rod into the wheel hub, and you can slide you wheel right on without fighting it. Easy pleasy. I have a couple of spares, I think 2 works even better than 1 🙂

Lastly, I installed the aluminum pedals. Been doing a lot of these installs since Porsche has been offering them cheap cheap.

996Ignition SwitchLubromolyMaintenanceOil ChangePorscheS/S Brake Lines

More from the Blog

Leave a Reply