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V-TT we’re from Staten Island and went to visit are friend Luigi who franks pizza restaurant in Lakewood he owns a 930 turbo stunner
Our gruppe of outlaws numbers around 35 guys and we cruise NJ a lot especially Sundays cafe and the airport cafe in blairswood plus my favorite sky cafe in Pittstown
hit me up
Got a few things I did recently I'll cover in a few posts.
First up, my driver's side door wouldn't unlock properly from the inside without doing the "bang on the area around the door handle" trick.
I replaced the central locking mechanism and that fixed it -- door unlocks perfectly now. Perhaps cleaning a contact for a sensor may have done the fix, but taking apart the door is a PITA so even if that fixed it for a while, I'd rather not have it happen again.
I'd already had the plastic bracket break that holds the unlock cable a few years ago so I was familiar enough with taking it apart. $265 part, but I believe I could have used a VW locking part for $50 or so. If this happens on the passenger side I'll look at going that route.
I was replacing my struts and strut mounts (another post) and had several broken tabs to fix on my front bumper (the side of it was bowing out after I scraped the front lip making a u-turn a little ways back). I also had to replace my passenger side front fender liner as it had come loose during a spirited drive with friends during Covid and melted a portion away that hit my tire. Front lip was also replaced.
Fender liner from ECS, $262 shipped...
I end up having to replace my front lip once every two years or so because my car is about 1" lower than stock. It simply scrapes and there is nothing nothing I can do about it other than treat it as a consumable item (and be thankful it's not my actual bumper scraping!). I am not installing a front-end lift kit.
The replacements off eBay have been OK, one was a little too hard and it broke instead of scraping the day after I installed it. However, the new replacement lip from Suncoast will run me literally $460 now
I went with a $140 replacement off eBay and we'll see how this one holds up. I'd use a pic from my car but it is embarassingly filthy right now.
Rebuilt both broken plastic tabs for my aftermarket LED DRL bars which I bought from Vivic Racing 11 years ago. These are old and they never quite seemed to be sealed proeprly so they'll get a little condensation in when it rains, but they've held up well enough after 10+ years and still function OK.
Repairs were done with 3m Superfast plastic, 3m Polyolefin adhesion promoter, and 3m body molding plastic. I'd never done this sort of thing before but did some homework and this seemed to be the route to go. This stuff starts hardening IMMEDIATELY so you can only mix enough to do one repair at a time, and even then you literally have seconds before it starts turning to gel and starting to set. It does get quite hard, seems to adhere well, and saved me buying an entire new set of LED DRL bars (without the tabs I can't screw them in, and no amount of 3m double-sided tape would hold them in place longer than a month or two.
A friend in a town south of Orlando called Lake Nona has a sizable garage and I was going to visit for a few weeks for a little Miami escape to take the bass boat out I keep up there...
Perfect time to finally replace my OEM struts and mounts -- they have 75K miles on them, and the roads here in South Beach are punishing. Going over any kind of bump was jarring, noisy, and simply turning the wheel at max extension was noisy and crunchy.
I'd put in GMG Springs+Sways+Dog Bones 12 years ago in 2011, when the car had probably 45,000 miles. Obviously the springs are going to reduce the OEM strut lifespan a bit and this repair was probably 10k miles overdue
I went with Bilstein B8 struts with PASM support and the OEM mounts - my goal was to get a strut that matched the sporty-street feel of the GMG springs. I have no need to lower the car more than it is (see my above post about my front lip scraping lol) so fully adjustable coilovers weren't that important.
I actually got in these struts in August of 2022, but despite ECS listing all four as in-stock, the front-right strut was not actually in their inventory. Despite several other vendors listing it as "in-stock", they falsely did not indicate this was a drop-shipped item -- and Bilstein was out of stock. They stated they would re-stock it in some desperate attempts to contact them once I finally had them Tweet me back. It's a trashy move on a vendor/company's part to only respond to social media these days (Bilstein ignored my emails), but whatever. I finally got the last strut in March from Meraki Autoworks, who were actually responsive in a forum post -- https://rennlist.com/forums/997-turb...l#post18693016
I thought I had all the necessary mount parts, but I didn't have some rubber piece that goes between the rear spring and the upper mount, so this took a few more days than expected. I haphazardly destroyed the boot on one of my front droplinks by not having my torx socket properly seated to counter-torque it, so I ended up buying two new droplinks despite the fact that they were still otherwise fine. I also saw both boots on both front axles were torn and leaking grease, and my rear tires were rotted. I'll save those for another post -- picture dump time.
I started the project having to jump-start the Turbo with my M3 before my drive up to Orlando. My little NOCO emergency starters just didn't do the trick in getting it going. I did have it on a CTEK trickle charger on it, but it looks it threw an error and stopped charging my battery (I believe one of the connections for an extension cable was unseated or slightly corroded).
All is well and the car is finally going in for an alignment at Apex Alignment here in Miami tomorrow, (one week out for an appointment) who did the alignment/corner balance on my M3 and come highly recommended.
Total cost after tax+shipping for the parts was $2563.
Last edited by djben; 07-05-2023 at 10:05 PM.
Reason: fix link
I saw both front axles had their inner and outer boots torn when doing my strut swap. This wasn't too surprising as this was my second set of axles on the car which now has 75K miles. Previously I'd bought used axles online when the boots were torn - one for $200 in 2015, and $300 in 2019.
I see that Vertex here in Miami sells rebuilt axles for $364+$500 core charge which is actually not bad considering rebuilding them yourself is an absolute MESS and a pita.
I know my car is going to need these again sometime in the next 4-8 years depending on how much I drive it, so I decided to bite the bullet and go for the rebuild myself, as who knows how long that rebuild option will be available and how much more expensive it will get.
Jim Wong's video here was helpful to understand what was involved:
I bought the rebuild kits from Pelican - inner and outer boots for both axles. Total was around $100. Probably spent $30 on Brakeclean, $20 in shop towels and another $20 on a pair of specialized pliars for the clamps. I reused the inside boot clamps as the new clamps that were shipped with the rebuild kit for one of the boots (pic below) needed some kind of weird rolling tool to install them that I didn't have nor was I interested in buying given the existing clamps were fine.
All bolts were also replaced as the hex heads of these get very easily rounded out (guess how I know). The new bolt style uses a "triple square" head, P/N 90006707309.
Missing a lot of pics from the process as it was late at night and I didn't want to get my phone covered in grease. I completely disassembled the inner bearings and cleaned them entirely with brake cleaner. Everything looked fine, no pitting or scoring on any bearings or their housings. Getting them reassembled was tricky but I managed to figure it out. Outer joint doesn't really get disassembled, just sprayed with brakeclean until it was completely degreased then hit with compressed air to dry it out before I replaced the boot and repacked it.
Also came up with my own method to inject all the grease from the packets using an ear wax injector from Walmart and a section of extra rubber fuel hose from some maintenance I did on my boat - the packets contain 50g of grease and that is what I found Porsche's requirement is for each of the boots.
We shall see how long these hold up - definitely not looking forward to doing this job again any time soon.
Got my first flat tire today on the way home from work today; driver’s side rear tire picked up a nail. Also, learned how to keep the side-view mirrors folded thanks to the tow truck driver! Something I’ve never tried to do is fold in the mirrors.
Just watched the video - and as we have almost clones (but opposite steering wheels and colours) - this is something on my radar - you said the sound Quality is lost?
How noticable?
Just watched the video - and as we have almost clones (but opposite steering wheels and colours) - this is something on my radar - you said the sound Quality is lost?
How noticable?
the OEM system with bose uses MOST fiber from the source PCM head unit to the amplifier which is a pure digital path.
aftermarket radios typically only have analog out. the adapters you use to integrate with the factory amp are doing analog to digital conversion, which is going to result in some loss of fidelity. on top of that you lose the ability to fade from front to rear as the adapters only accept 2 channels rather than 4.
it's relatively minor, you'd have to be a real audiophile with great hearing to truly notice inside this car, especially when it's moving. the cabin noise in these cars is quite noisy. adding some sound deadening to the doors was a great mod for me, it helped a lot.
I went with the NAV-TV adapter kit like 10 years ago and a Kenwood unit on my yellow 997TT. Just upgraded to a newer Kenwood with wireless carplay like this one and it was a simple swap - even the original GPS adapter plugged right in. I also added the Kenwood backup camera to it when I first did the install, and it worked great with the newer unit.
06-30-2023, 05:37 PM
