Orient Express

Increased vibration is a sure sign of a failed mount. Also the engine will not set level and one muffler tip may be lower than the other. In addition a failed motor mount will put stress on the transmission mount by making it twist from the lopsided engine. Again, this misses the point entirely. Lifting the car by the engine is not a root cause of mount failure. If a mount bursts during a lift, it was because the mount was already beyond its useful life and was going to fail regardless of if the car was lifted by the engine, or not. It was a "dead mount walking" and was going to fail, that is just the facts. If a mount bursts during a lift, be glad it failed when it had your attention, rather than out on the road somewhere, where you would not know that it failed.

I'm not sure I understand your logic. My argument is that there is no difference in lifting the car by the motor or by the suspension crossmember. Both are safe, and it is totally up to the person doing the lifting to decide what works best for them. If your jack is not long enough to reach the crossmember, then use the engine. The issue about motor mount failures is only casually related to lifting the car, not a root cause. All cars that use fluid filled mounts will have them fail between 60-150K miles. It is a simple truth. If your car has fluid filled mounts, they are going to fail in that mileage window. If you have any car with 100K+ miles and it has the original fluid filled motor mounts still installed, then they should be replaced. The only question you have to ask yourself is, "Would you rather have your mounts fail without you knowing it and drive around on collapsed ones, or be aware of the condition of your car, and know that the mounts should be replaced?"

This issue about motor mounts continues to be a much debated issue, and unfortunately much of the "con" debate is by the lay members of this board. As someone that has lifted quite literally hundreds of 911s by the engine, I would like to again state that this type of temporary lift to place the car on jack stands is never the root cause of a 993 or 996 motor mount failure. If a mount fails during a lift, then the mount was going to fail anyway due to fatigue. These types of fluid filled mounts used on Porsche. VW, Audi, BMW, are notorious for fatigue failure in as little as 60K miles. I would much rather have a mount fail during a lift than it fail silently out on the road, and it be many miles, months or even years before it was discovered. In all the years I have been lifting cars by their engines, I have only seen 2 mount failures. One was already busted, and the other started leaking during the lift. Both cars had 60K+ miles on them. As a routine part of any lift, I also check the mounts for leakage from usage failure. So in conclusion, I say lift with confidence by the engine, don't leave the car suspended by the jack any more time than it takes to position the rear jack stands, and if you do have a mount fail during a lift, be thankful that it happened then instead of out on the road where you would never know. Lastly, replacing a busted motor mount is a simple 3 bolt affair that takes 30 minutes or less, and the part is under $150.

I use Testors Red model paint and a fine brush.

Here is the way I have been doing it for years without any ill effect. Your results may vary.

You can rerouting the signal cable to get less whine, but it is an imprecise science. I have my iPod cable coming out of the ashtray, and I have found with my old rig that by just physically turning iPod a certain way, the hysteresis loop would collapse and the whine would disappear. It is a hit or miss situation. The telephone connector has a good ground, and that is where I assume you got your switched and unswitched power too. If you look next to the telephone connector on top of the transmission hump under the front center console, you will see a silver box with an orange connector and 4 bolts attaching it to the hump. That is the airbag controller. I put my ground to one of those bolts. My new rig has no whine, and with no iPod (in my case iPhone) connected, there is just a trace with the volume cranked all the way up. To be honest, at that volume, there is more amplifier noise, than ground loop noise. With a signal attached, the whine is unnoticeable. I think that most of the credit goes to the Blitzsafe box. I highly recommend their interface.

A source of ground loop noise can be as simple as the re-routing of the audio signal wires. I have found moving the iPod connector cable around can make the whine go away. I just updated my iPod/Becker aux-in rig with the Blitzsafe Universal iPod/iPhone adapter in combination with a ground loop isolator between the adapter and the Becker aux-in cable. This setup has completely eliminated all of the ground loop noise I had with my old iPod rig. I also found that the 2 best ground points for this sort of stuff are either the telephone power wiring connector under the front center console, or one of the mounting lugs for the airbag controller, also under the front center console.

Yes, iPod, iTouch, and iPhone now use the USB 5v line exclusively for power, (prior to the iTouch, iPods had both Firewire and USB power-in leads) but they are on different traces, so plugging in a USB compliant player into a Firewire source won't cause any issues, the device simply won't get any power from the firewire cable. The audio out will probably work, but that is it. Your second point about finding a device to work with the Becker Aux-in is the what I wrote about. The combination of the Becker BAS - 1319 - 116 Telephone/Aux-In cable and the Blitzsafe iPod/iTouch/iPhone universal interface solves all of this. And no, you do not have to be in airplane mode to make this work. There is no interference whatsoever. I have this rig in my 996 with a Traffic Pro, and it works perfectly. Getting a single cable to accommodate the limited Becker AUX port design, step down the voltage to from 12 to 5 volts, AND trick the iPhone into thinking it is connected to a USB data cable is child's play. The Blitzsafe solution is a perfect example of this. If you already have a firewire power adapter connected to your Becker, you can also purchase a Firewire to USB inline adapter from Scoche. This little adapter will allow you to continue to charge and power your USB iTouch/iPod/iPhone device in your Firewire rig. If we had been discussing this issue 6 months ago, there were not many solutions out there, but today, the market has caught up, and there are plenty of solutions to be had.

This Becker cable does not work with the iTouch or iPhone. The solution that I have found that works with the CDR 220 and Traffic Pro is from BlitzSafe. You still need the BAS - 1319 - 116 Telephone/Aux-In cable from Becker, but you get full compatibility with the entire iPod/iTouch/iPhone prodict line.

Yes 2002's are the most desirable (seriously) and best of breed compared to other 996 years because: 1. MkII chassis and engine 2. upgraded interior, and lighting 3. last year of old school analog radios which making upgrading or adding an iPod cheap and easy. 4. Cabriolets have glass rear windows. As far as I can see there are no advantages to the later MkII cars, and the addition of the MOST bus for infotainment was a serious short coming because of its lack of widespread adoption in the industry, severely limiting your audio, navigation, and upgrading options. Later MkII engines benefited from improvements in the RMS and IMS, but those improvements were also applied to earlier cars that had problems with these issues. If you are considering a 996, get a 2002 MkII and make sure that the IMS/RMS seals have been upgraded to the latest versions.

I just use off the shelf grey primer paint, and it works just fine. No problems at all.

That is what I am thinking, aftermarket shocks. If the shocks do not have a big sticker or remnant of one with a barcode on it, it is aftermarket. Also look on the rear roll bar on the left side and see if you can find a paint dot. If you can tell us what color it is. Also on the springs there should be 3 paint marks on them. what color are those.

Every car has something call "readiness" in which all of the emission systems report that they are operating correctly. This is separate from the CEL warning that a component has failed or reported an out of spec condition. You need to find someone that has a system tester that can reset the readiness test parameters and have the car re-run it. What you are seeing is a remnant of when the test was ran with the bad component reporting. This is not a big deal at all.

Essentially the 90K service is an oil change, air & cabin filter change, and brake fluid flush if this 90K maintenance is on a 2 or 3 year incremental anniversary. Be sure to do it.

Fixed & Deleted. sorry for the intrusion.

If this radio has a Aux input, then Try this one.

Each key has a unique ID in a RFID tag ( the little grey pill) that is associated with the key. The RFID tag is normally passive but can be energized by conductance which allows it to transmit its unique ID. This is very similar to hotel door card keys or EZ-Pass pads for paying tolls, etc. When you stick the key in the ignition and try to start the car, there is a little transmitter/receiver in the key mechanism that pings the RFID tag, the tag transmits its ID, and if that ID is registered in the Car ECU key database, the car will start. If not, then no start. Adding the key's ID is relatively simple, but it requires 2 things, the Keys ID number, and a Porsche System Tester to access the car's key database and add the ID number. If you have one key that is already associated with the car, adding additional keys does not require knowing the ID number of the new key, but if you break or lose all of the keys the car already knows about, and don't have one that will start the car, then you have to have the Key ID of the new key to be manually coded in. Depending on your relationship with your dealer, many will recode new or additional keys for gratis or charge you about a half hour labor. Others may try to soak you for more. I would not pay more than $50 to get a key coded (assuming you have the key and it is physically cut already). If you are starting from scratch, expect to pay about $175 for the key blank, another $50 - 100 to get it cut, and another $50 - $100 to get the car coded.

Not really. I know lots of folks that get similar life out of their rear tires. But on the other side, there are just as many that can't get more than 9 or 10 thousand miles out of their rears (these are the same people that only get 25K out of their clutch plate too!). I think it just boils down to how you choose to drive your car.

My experience with the M030 ROW setup is that the ROW alignment specifications dial in a lot of negative camber in the rear. While this really makes the turn in on the car quite spectacular, it also severely shortens the life of the rear tires, by accelerating the wear in the inside of the tire. I had previously gotten 22-25K miles on a rear set of tires with the US alignment specs, and with the ROW specs the tire life went down to 16K miles. I have reset the alignment to the US specs and while the turn in is not quite as crisp, I can live with that if it means I will gain 6 to 9 thousand miles of tread life on my $400 rear tires.

Funny you should mention this, I just reset my AB light yesterday. The majority of Air Bag warning lights are because of intermittent Seatbelt buckle switch issues with the microswitch (gunk or lint in the buckle) or a loose ground. Usually just buckling and unbuckling the belt cures the problem, but you still have to use either the Factory Porsche tester or a Durametric tester to reset the light. If the fault is in the buckle, blowing compressed air into it can clean out any lint or debris that might cause the switch not to close. One less common problem with the buckle is if the connectors under the seat have come apart, but this is less common. Hopefully, your Dealer, will do a goodwill reset of the fault.

The seat track motor has a cable in a Bowden tube that the drive gear is attached too. The cable gets dry and binds in the Bowden tube which makes the groaning noise. The fix is to remove the seat, disassemble the track motor assembly and lubricate the cable in the Bowden tube.

Probably the secondary air pump coming on. If it only happens at cold start, and just a bit after startup, and then goes away after a minute or two, that is what it is. This is a standard VW part on just about every engine VW makes (the Bugatti Veyron has 2 of them). My Audi's air pump sounds like a vacuum cleaner with rocks in the blades. I don't think you have anything to worry about.

Yes the 996 and 997 hardtops are essentially the same. for 03 and later 996, and all 997s you will need to install the attachment hardware on the car.

All the more for outrage, as while a 20K service is replacing the 15K service from older cars, things like air filters are 40K items, and wiper blades may not need replacing for the life of the car. Early change of filters and blades is the oldest trick in the book to boost an already bloated profit margin for service. And as the "John" in the transaction, what are you going to do? Argue with the cashier? Having a good relationship with you dealer does not mean having to give them a payoff so you can trivial things addressed, especially if the car is under warranty. If you car is out of warranty, then a better use of you money is to invest in diagnostic software to clear those lights and have a few basic tools so you can change your own oil, air and pollen filters, then to overpay inflated prices at a dealer. One of the things that impresses me about modern (996 and later) Porsches, is how simple they are to service, and how infrequent the service requirements are. These cars are no more complicated and difficult to service than a Honda Civic. There is no reason why one should pay more to service a Porsche than a Honda.

It is one thing to be able to read a checklist, and another to be able to understand what a checklist actually means and how to rank the things on the list. As I said in my earlier post, the 15 or 20K maintenance is essentially an oil change, simple as that. The keywords to look for are "replace or adjust". All of the other things that start with "inspect, review or check" are just that, i.e, "is it low, dripping, squeaking, bent or is the light on?" Even with all of these "inspect, etc. the entire maintenance process takes less than an hour. To my point about the cost of dealer provided maintenance, paying $600 for an oil change is an extremely bad value, and something that I encourage everyone to understand and look for cheaper alternatives, such as getting to know your car and developing the basic skills to maintain it. Now with that said, $600 for an oil change is an extremely good value for a automotive dealer or repair facility. The margin on this sort of service is close to 500% or more, and a couple of these jobs a week can make them a hefty profit. Now if your circumstance is such that contributing your hard earned wages to the dealers bottom line is acceptable, then have at it (but remember what Thomas Tusser said on the subject), but for myself, I would rather learn my car, pay myself that money, and use it for some self-gratuitous activity! BTW, next time there is a "Work on Cars" event in your area, I highly recommend attending. This is a great place to learn how to do your own maintenance, with others that have mastered the task close by to answer questions. My posts are all always in good fun, and not intended to insult anyone, but if you are embarrassed at your level of confidence in maintaining your car, then use the forum to learn, don't get mad, get smart! Be one with your car, learn it, know it. Knowledge is power, and knowledgeable people rarely if ever pay retail. They also use self-lubricating (or urethane "racing") muffler bearings, and sealed-fluid headlights! :D