Porsche 911 Carrera Upgrades Continued Rennsport Kansas City

A few things needed for our project have arrived, so I was able to make pretty decent progress on it this week.

The fuel pump was noisy when hot, so I replaced that with a new bosch pump. Not uncommon for these old pumps to get noisy with heat, so a good preventative measure before it locked up on us.

Then something fun 🙂 Aero mirror conversion. The kit comes with about a bazillion little pieces to assemble.

The main housing spring assembled with washers.

And the bottom of the mirror housing, ready to be mated to the base.

The mirror motor support installed.

Special tool KEW-P102. This is a two part tool, the other part is one of your buddies, preferably the fat one.

How the base sits on the spring.

And with enough downward pressure and some twisting, you can get the camlock to lock into place, holding the mirror housing and base together.

Then the old flag style mirrors have to come off the car.

This is the tricky part. Most guys just hack everything off, but really an AMP tool is all you need to pull each pin out of the connector. Once the connector is off, then you can pull the wiring harness out of the mirror and remove the mirror from the body.

And this is what you are left with. In reality, we could have cut the harness just behind the pins in this case, as we have to use a different pin style for the new connector, but if you are ever removing mirrors or paint or replacement, then the proper tool should be used.

And the new mirror housing in place. The pin outs will be slightly different than the old connectors used (different connector style for the 965 aero mirrors).

Applicable to 87 and later models:

Passenger side with mirror motor installed.

And the mirror glass in place.

And after getting an oil line that fit, the new SSI’s and Rarlyl8 muffler. “I’m Rarlyl8, but when I am, I drink Dos Equis.”

Then we had to figure out why the A/C wasn’t working. When the owner bought the car a few weeks ago, the dealer stated the car was in perfect operating condition and that everything worked. The new owner received the car, only to find out the A/C did not work. I started poking around, and well, I guess it is hard to have any freon in a system that is missing a hose! Depending on how this plays out for the new owner, dealer responsibility, and their unwillingness to pick up the bill, I may or may not include the name of the dealer here later……I mean, the blog only gets about 1500 hits a day.

After some digging, I found it tucked out of the way on the backside of the engine.

Since I wanted to pull the compressor to put in fresh oil, I yanked off the other line, only to find a plug in the line. Uh…..

Compressor out on the bench. Replacing the plate seals, then putting in fresh oil, and back on the car it goes.

Found the A/C power line completely taped up with black electrical tape and shoved back in the corner…….

And finally I got the gauges on it, sucked it down, turned off the vacuum, and to my disappointment, watched it lose vacuum immediately. Huh.

So out of curiosity I grabbed the condensor lines which were also loose, removing them from the condensor to find these shoved in the lines. Argh.

After all of that, I was finally able to pull a vacuum down and get it to hold for 20 minutes. Now we can install a new drier, put some R12 in the system and rock and roll!

More from the Blog

3 Comments

Leave a comment
Kevin

August 2, 2012 at 8:02 AM

That A/C issue is a crime. In the interest of decency and on behalf of those of us that are still Porsche shopping (yes, I will admit that sometimes I consider looking at a car at a dealer), we need to know the name of the unscrupulous dealer that thinks an A/C system that has been disconnected and plugged is in perfect working order. Consider it a public service announcement. 😉

Simmons

August 4, 2012 at 9:18 PM

So the lines were capped sometime in the past and someone just reconnected (almost) everything without removing the caps?

    porschedoc

    August 6, 2012 at 8:05 AM

    Yup, can’t quite figure out why they removed lines, installed caps, reinstalled, lol.

Leave a Reply to Kevin Cancel reply