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GOOD BUY I was bidding on this car when it was listed on Copart. Do you have a link to the front bumper? How is the fitment? Is there any significant body work required to ensure it fits perfectly?
Small world! I'm definitely happy with this buy so far.
For the bumper, I got it from CMST (from what I can tell, I think Rennmeister has the same kit on his site) and it fits pretty well. Don't get me wrong though, you will need patience to get it to fit right. I found that getting things to line up at first was a pain and the inserts for the DRL's and mesh grills were out of shape from shipping. I had to heat those a bit to get them to move back into shape. I found that installing the chin spoiler first will help significantly in getting things to line up as that will keep the bumper somewhat rigid and in shape. No major body work needed, you will need to trim back the radiator shrouds as they'll hit the back of the bumper and prevent it from lining up properly and then I did have to drill one new hole on the bottom side of the bumper to get the holes to line up with the threaded insert on the bottom of the passenger side radiator. Make sure to save the threaded clip nuts from the stock bumper so you can reuse them on the new one. Also to note, if you order from CMST, the GT3 style DRL's do not come included with the bumper kit so you'll have to purchase those separately, but the kit does include the wiring harness extensions needed for those. It looks like Rennmeister includes them with their kit.
Glad it ended up being agreeable even if that's not perfect. now go out and have some fun! congrats brother!
FYI the **** shop that did my rebuild did a much worse job and i had a much worse experience ( 5 months late). then i spent 3 months cleaning it up and a bunch of money and headaches on top of it.
Glad it ended up being agreeable even if that's not perfect. now go out and have some fun! congrats brother!
FYI the **** shop that did my rebuild did a much worse job and i had a much worse experience ( 5 months late). then i spent 3 months cleaning it up and a bunch of money and headaches on top of it.
Wow! 5 months and still had issues afterwards? Were you able to negotiate with them for the costs that came after?
Wow! 5 months and still had issues afterwards? Were you able to negotiate with them for the costs that came after?
haha no, the owner (come to find out after) was a broke dic* and it did me no good. i just handled it myself and i am very happy now. sometimes you just have to move on for your own sanity.
First weekend having it out and I attended two events on Sunday. The first was a Cars and Coffee in the morning and then an evening event that a friend of mine puts on. The car was a crowd pleaser and an absolute blast to drive! I love this thing, I did a quick cut/buff/polish on it and the paint glossed up really well.
I'll be dropping it off at my detailer this week and I decided to just go with standard clear PPF. I really like the gloss so opted to stick with that. Since I'm still planning to install the RS fenders and carbon hood this winter, we'll skip putting film on those areas now and I'll bring it back to him once I get those installed. He's really good about documenting the process on the cars he works on so I'll share some of those once I get them, I can't wait to see it after, he makes paint look new again.
Alright I've got some good, bad, weird, and kind of funny updates here. For the good, I had my car at the detailer for the last week+ and he installed Stek PPF on the front bumper, headlights, mirrors, and the one-piece A-pillars/roofline/rear quarters/lower rockers. It was quite a bit of effort to do those one-piece rear quarters and he really did a great job on it. I'll post a few photos at the bottom, if you're in my area of central IL and you're looking for a quality detailer, Fisher Detailing is the guy.
For the funny, when I dropped the car off to him I told him that if he was going to let it sit for more than 4 days he would need to plug the charger in or the car would die. I left the charger in the frunk for this reason. He assured me it would be fine and he would start the car occasionally so he probably wouldn't need the charger. Fast forward to this week when I picked it up, I went to open the door and found the window didn't notch down like it's supposed to... dead battery. We then proceeded to spend the next hour trying to get a charge through the fuse panel but his jump pack wasn't working properly. Then it finally dawned on me that the antigravity battery has the built it back up jump charge reserve (d'oh!). The previous owner left the key fobs for it in the center council and I just forgot about it. Thank god for that reserve charge, it worked and we got the car fired up. Definitely a lesson learned on my part to have the battery fob on my keys.
The weird part about this dead battery situation is that once we got the car fired up, the radio started working. After I replaced the amp I haven't had time to code it to the PCM properly, but somehow this battery issue reset it. It's the first time I could listen to music while driving so that was nice. I don't have my hopes up that it will last though as I'm pretty sure I still need to code it properly. I'll be picking up a piwis III this week.
Now for the bad and this has nothing to do with the detailer work or anything like that. It ties back to the shop that did the PDK leak repair. When I got the car back from them a few weeks ago, I noticed that when I shift the trans into park, it doesn't seem to seat properly and I get a warning on the dash that says "park not engaged" and the light on the dash blinks. Then I have to push slightly forward on the shifter and the button pops up. Most of the time this gets it seated correctly, but sometimes it still doesn't and I have to push it a bit more. All of the other gears work fine. I first thought this was a cable adjustment issue so I got the car in the air to check. Everything on the trans side seemed fine, there was no play in the cable and the bracket was tight. So then I turned my attention to the shifter and removed the center council trim. Once I got down the actual mechanism I found that the top plate/cover of the shifter was not sitting flush with the base. It's part number 9G1.426.011.10 and the top plate bolts down to the base with 4 screws. The shifter extends up through that top plate, but for some reason it's bound up and not allowing the top plate form sit flush. I have no idea how this happened, it was working completely fine before I dropped it off. At this point I'm not even going to bother going back to them for this, I'll just order a replacement shifter and install it. I can live with this current situation for a little while but I'll have the replacement on order this week.
One last good thing to mention is that @SamboTT@ByDesign is the best! He took my datalogs and sent me back a modified tune all while he was on vacation. I really appreciate that. This car is a blast.
Fast forward to this week when I picked it up, I went to open the door and found the window didn't notch down like it's supposed to... dead battery. We then proceeded to spend the next hour trying to get a charge through the fuse panel but his jump pack wasn't working properly. Then it finally dawned on me that the antigravity battery has the built it back up jump charge reserve (d'oh!). The previous owner left the key fobs for it in the center council and I just forgot about it. Thank god for that reserve charge, it worked and we got the car fired up. Definitely a lesson learned on my part to have the battery fob on my keys.1
Awesome story, love that you figured it out because that is exactly why we made them.... I was reading that you Car only lasts about 4 days and the battery drains? You might want to check the level of parasitic drain and figure that out what might becausing that, because you can usually get a few weeks out of our 40Ah battery, in the 991s that don't have extra accessories and such. I have not read all the thread so you might have addressed that already.
Awesome story, love that you figured it out because that is exactly why we made them.... I was reading that you Car only lasts about 4 days and the battery drains? You might want to check the level of parasitic drain and figure that out what might becausing that, because you can usually get a few weeks out of our 40Ah battery, in the 991s that don't have extra accessories and such. I have not read all the thread so you might have addressed that already.
Thanks for the reply! I do believe there's a parasitic drain occurring and I suspect it's from the radar laser shifters that are installed on the car. I figured out a quick way to test to see if those are active when the car is off and I'll do that tonight. If they're off, I'll begin pulling fuses and tracing the drain to try and find it.
Thanks for the reply! I do believe there's a parasitic drain occurring and I suspect it's from the radar laser shifters that are installed on the car. I figured out a quick way to test to see if those are active when the car is off and I'll do that tonight. If they're off, I'll begin pulling fuses and tracing the drain to try and find it.
That would be good for you. There are alot of good video on checking for parasitic drain on Youtube, but even after that make sure you do and inline test with an Ammeter inline on the Ground cable to the Neg battery post to see it there is something in the system you might not have caught. Alot of times people have done stuff with wiring before you bought the car, whether is stereo, radar, camera or even GPS hook ups that track the car and it can be hard to find. Good luck. Just wanted to make sure you know the battery should give you two weeks if not quite a bit longer before discharge is occuring IF you knock out any oddball parasitic draw. But with radar detector, cameras and so on you will have some.
It's been a bit since I last updated the thread and I've done some more to the car. Not a whole lot since I've been driving the wheels off the thing to make up for lost time while it was in the shop for the lengthy transmission repair. A couple weeks ago I picked up a set of headers from Racing Dynamics. Finally got around to installing those this weekend and I'm really liking the added sound from these. The car is noticeably raspier at both the cold start and spirited pulls. I was mainly going for sound with these since I knew they probably weren't going to add much power. Thanks Sambo for the feedback and advice. These complete the race inspired exhaust system though and they look pretty cool. Only issue I ran into with installing these was that the holes in the turbo flange were drilled for the provided 10mm bolts, but the turbo's themselves use 8mm bolts. I was not even remotely okay with the thought of drilling out the holes in the turbos to the 10mm size, so I modified some bushings to make up for the 2mm gap and used 8mm bolts. Seems to work fine. I was pleasantly surprised that all of the bolts broke free without much trouble. I did soak them in penetrating oil though just to be on the safe side. All in all, this took a couple hours and I took my time doing it. I purchased 18 new head/manifold bolts from Porsche as well. Ran it for a long heat cycle yesterday after around 80 miles of driving and re-torqued the head bolts. Each needed a retightening after the first drive.
Also since the last update, I picked up a PIWIS III clone from OBDII Shop. Now I wish I could report back that everything has been all sunshine and rainbows with it, but that's just not the case. I ordered the full kit with the laptop, program, VCI and cables. At first, it worked fine, I was able to see all of the diagnostics, check various things, clear the oil change reminder. I initially got it so I could program the replacement amplifier I installed, but came to find out that the PIWIS needed to be "online" and I wasn't going to be able to do it myself. I'll have to take it to a dealer to do that. Unfortunately, shortly after getting it, things went sideways. Neither the OBDII support engineer or myself knows how it happened, but the next time I plugged into the car, the PIWIS software license was gone. It somehow got erased and the program would not work. The OBDII Shop engineer remoted into the laptop and installed a new license for the software.
Fixed right? at least so I thought. Once the new license was installed, I plugged it back in to check it. The program pulled up fine, showed the correct license info, but I could not get it to connect to, or locate, the VCI. I did some digging and found the license for the VCI was also gone, the file was empty. Again, no clue how this happened. I reached back out to OBDII shop and after more troubleshooting, they sent me a replacement VCI. A week later it arrived, I performed the self-test on it and it passed. But, tried to get the program to connect to the VCI and it still would not find it. No matter what we tried, the PIWIS software would not locate the new VCI. The VCI manager program identified it fine, showed the license info, the driver info, etc. but the PIWIS program could never connect to it. Finally, after several failed back and forth attempts with the OBDII Shops engineer, they agreed to take it all back and send me a full replacement of the entire system. Laptop, VCI, cables, etc. I packed up the original stuff and mailed it back last week, headed back to China. I anticipate about a month turnaround until I get the replacement system back. It's been way more of a hassle then I anticipated, but their customer service has been pretty decent. While I can't reprogram the replacement amplifier with this system, I will need it to code the replacement PDK gear shifter when I go to install that. My research says I should be able to at least code that properly with the clone system.
Anyways, planning more mods this winter but really enjoying the heck of the car until then. It's a hit at shows and people are amazed by the story of the salvage/rebuilt title. A few that I've told the story too are now actively looking to do the same with other cars. We'll see if they have the same luck.
