Chuck Jones

I'm not sure about other models...but I have the toggle switch on the dash that turns the PSM on and off. It alsways defaults to on. Since the options for the 99 always included both the codes of 220 and 222...wouldn't they have to have the toggle switch to turn the feature on/off? Maybe my approach to this is too simplistic??

It's certainly different...but I'd have to see that thing in person to see how it really works. Until then, I'd reserve comment and stick with the time tested and true set of jack stands I have sitting in the garage. A lot of the Sears tools and jacks are coming out of China...which in itself isn't an indictment of the product....but we've all seen in the news lately how Quality control seems to be a foreign concept (no pun intended) to the Chinese manufacturing processes whether it's the steel or ingredients for dog food.

I had the same problem...high engagement. I bled the clutch using the DIY from RennTech....same procedure as bleeding the brakes....Search RennTech or ask Loren for the DIY link and give it a try. I didn't cure the problem completely, but it did lower the engagement point a bit. The clutch is hydraulic so there's no real adjustment you can make. Eventually the only real cure is a new clutch....but bleeding it has allowed me to extend the time element for a replacment. May not work for you...but it's worth a try.

SharkWerks are probably one of the best places you could go to have a supercharger installed. James is a walking encyclopaedia of the Porsche systems. You shouldn't go into the installation of a supercharger with the idea that you're going to get your money back out of it when you go to sell. You install a supercharger for your own pleasure....it's going to set you back about $12K....maybe a bit more. You'll never get that back....and I see you're in California....where do you plan on registering that car? You'll never pass an "official" smog check on that car becasue EVOM hasn't gone thru the approval process for their product line thru the Air Resources folks. I'd love to have a supercharger....but the registration process is a bit dicey.

To be honest with you...the seal is no big deal really. There's a lot of hoop-la made over the RMS, but basically it's a seal that's replaceable for about $800, or you can let it leak for a while till you need a clutch job and it won't be detrimental to the health of your engine. The PPI is the thing you should be focused on...and have them run the onboard computer and get a print out of the category 1 and 2 events as well as a lot of other information that can be used to determine the health of your engine. There are discussion threads here on how to read the DME outputs and what they mean. For instance, you can see the total number of hours your engine has been running.....this can be used as a baseline for other data to make fairly accurate determinations of how the car has been treated....or whether there are issues that need to be looked into. The other option you have....which sounds like you're already going down that path....is that you trust the guy and will go with the deal based upon the verbal assurances he's going to give you. Your explanation of your relationship with the dealership is full of "He also said that......" Remember, talk is cheap....it really comes down to what your expectations are when something really goes wrong and you come back to the same guy who's giving you the assurances now. What are they willing to do to help you out? What will they cover versus expect you to cover? Without a warranty...they're under little or no obligation to do much of anything except charge you for the repairs. Are you "comfortable" with the deal? Comfort is an elusive subject that lasts as long as nothing goes wrong.... and is best quantified by a good warranty. I don't mean to sound negative...because there are a lot of good honest dealerships out there with some really nice cars to sell......but it's the "Oh-oh" part of the scenarios that you have to think about.

Don't let them rush you into a signing....if they want to do the deal, they can wait a day or two. I take it that the car isn't being offered with a CPO warranty otherwise this would be a moot point. Loren raises some very valid and relevant points. Again, I realize the car is beautiful...has every option you want, and you don't want to see someone else scoop you....but do NOT let them rush you into a signing.....they want to sell it to you...but make sure that it's under YOUR conditions, not theirs. I rushed into a deal and it ended up costing ME about $1500 when it should have been taken care of by the previous owner....haste makes waste.

Then if it's not to the wheels, you may be able to do it....but I have little or no faith in the claims of some of the marketing folks about the level of HP they claim to be able to get from their particular product. The most "scientific" info I've seen lately...and even that is under scrutiny....is related to the RSS Plenum. There have been a number of folks who have dyno'd it as well as run times on GTek and a goodly number of these folks are reporting increased performance by virtue of HP as well as reduced 0-60 times.. Whether the CAI's really produce that sort of HP is up for grabs. I personally run the EVO...and can't tell you if it does much other than sounds great when you go to WOT.

I truly doubt that you're going to get to 330 or 340 to the wheels with any of the mods you mentioned. The best HP mod you can get is a supercharger....and that's going to set you back around $12K. Probably the most reliable way to get horses is save your money and buy a 996TT.....otherwise, you're chasing an elusive butterfly called mod HP. Ask me how I know....I've got just about every mod but a SC....and now I'm looking at a TT. If you're stuck on chasing mods...then you can spend aobut $995 for GIAC flash....$595 for the EVO CAI, $900 or more for the RSS Plenum, $1800 for Bilstein PSS9's (plus installation and alignment/corner balance etc) ; another $1K or more for a set of headers; another $1200 for a good set of mufflers.....and you can keep going till your VISA screams in agony....and after all that, you'd be lucky if you managed to get another 30 HP. If I had it to do all over again, I'd buy a top quality set of mufflers for the psychological effect of sound that makes it seem faster, and a really good suspension system (with decent tires depending upon street or track preference)....which does more for your driveability than just about anything.

Loren and I did this same thing today...took off the front bumper and cleaned out the area between the radiators and the condenser....I had been vacuuming the front of the condenser and thought that everything was clean in there. I was really surprised when Loren took off the bumber and I saw all the crud sandwiched in between the them. We didn't have to take off the wheels, but there are quite a few phillips screws in a number of hard to see locations that you have to take off. I would have missed a few of them, but Loren knew where they all were. While we had the front bumper off, we also took out the factory horns and installed the "Italian Super Loud Air Horns" that Griot's sells. The are as advertised....Loud! Plust they have that two tone "Euro sound"....however you choose to describe that particular two-tone sound. The horns are rated at about 137db....and only cost $39.95....pretty good deal really. They do get folks' attention.

"Thought experiment: Consider what is happening to a car's traction patches when it travels around a 45deg banked corner and is pulling 1 g. Intuitively we know that the banking provides additional grip. In this case the vertical vector associated with gravity and the lateral vector associated with turning, are both equal at 1g. Since they are equal the sum of the horizontal and vertical acceleration components is a 45deg acceleration vector. Since, in this example, the banking is at 45deg, the sum of the acceleration vectors are exactly perpendicular to the track." HUH???? I think I'm just going to buy new tires when I see the safety bars..... :)

I'd sure like to bid on the engine from that car!!!

UT Porsche: I don't know who's giving you the quotes for those mods, but you can do a whole lot better pricewise if you shop around....and I have a slightly different take on the mods. These mods can add up to a lot of money that you'll never recover if you sell your car. Although you've seen a lot of mods listed here, most are cosmetic. I believe that you should start with function first, then go for form. Since function deals with the car's performance, a good foundation is sequentially the best place to start...which is a good suspension system...you'd be surprised how much that improves the driveability of your car.....although I'll probably draw some flack for my approach...the other "stuff" is basically bling. I'd stick with the performance things first...take a look at the research and comments on the various intake systems, the short shifter kits, the RSS Plenum, a good set of mufflers. The carbon fibre and litronics are neat....but all that is really nothing but eye candy.

REALLY???? Just at 4 hours? I'm going to go and look at my indy's flat rate manual and see wazzap.....That would mean that at $90 an hour....$360 plus say another $400 for the clutch....well under $1K. Sometime back, I was having some issues with my clutch and Loren sent me the DIY on bleeding the clutch....something I didn't know you could do. I had it done and it did improve the feel of the clutch release....you might want to try that before you jump for the clutch....in my case, that was about 10K miles ago....so I extended the time period for a clutch job....which ultimately I'm going to need.

Nice looking car....but as you can see, I'm not a fan of red Porsches......Welcome to the forum.

I just checked with my indy...and through Sunset you can pick up the clutch for around $350 and the flat rate manual shows a clutch job as taking around 5-7 hours depending upon the expertise of the mechanic. At around $90 an hour, thats about $450 to $600 for labor...all of which comes to around $1000 or a little more. It sounds like $2,000 is about double what it should be.... I always buy the parts myself, then have the indy put them in....that way you don't get charged the extra money they tack on to a part. As long as they are Porsche parts, the indy or dealership shouldn't object. Some of them won't mess around with any part that's an aftermarket manufacturer....can't say as I blame them.

Today I printed out that CB display directions sheet and tried going through the various functions to see how they worked. I was able to get the display to show the various codes, (c1, c2, c3 etc) but anytime I hit a display that showed a temperature....it displayed it in Celcius rather than Farenheit. I tried the procedure for changing from C to F, but it wouldn't work. All temperature displays except for the one that showed the outside temperature, displayed in C. Anyone else notice this? Were you able to get it to display in F? I was looking to display the engine and water temp in F.

I had never thought about leaving the wheel lock inside the car so that you couldn't take off the wheel to get at the emergency release cable....but that's a good issue to raise. This makes it even more sensible to REROUTE the emergency release cable so that it comes out the front of the car inside the front grill tucked back in there so you can get to it without going through all those other gyrations. I put a black zip tie on mine when I rerouted it to the front....stuffed the cable back up so you can't see it and only the black zip tie hangs down. All you have to do is pull on the zip tie, the cable drops down, and you're in. Same goes for the emergency cable to the engine compartment.

CAGUY: I always email directly to Jeff....and he responds right away unless your email was snagged by a spam blocker...but try using this email address and just tell him what you want. He assigns a number to your request and it's tracked thru the system so it doesn't fall in the cracks..... here's his address..... JeffClark@sunsetimports.com I'm sure you'll be pleased with their service....I know I have been. Chuck

I'm a constant shopper and am continually searching the web for the best prices. Other than an occasional "barn find" on eBay, I've found that Sunset consistently has the best prices and selection for Porsche parts. I go through Jeff Clark...who's always professional and extremely helpful. Chuck

I just ordered a couple of these from Sunset Porsche for $10.03 each and the part number was 996.504.604.00. My parts looked pretty much the same except one obviously went on the left and the other on the right. If you're saying the parts are different then you might want to check with Loren for a PET number confirmation...but my car is also a 99 996 C2. These are plastic air diverters and because they hang down under the car, they're subject to getting torn off on speed bumps or those concrete parking stops. chuck

That last picture posted by Orient....is that the radiator that's actually BEHIND the AC evaporator? That gunk is what was sandwiched BETWEEN the radiator and the AC evaporator? Or is that just what's on the front of the radiator? I've been routinely cleaning off the radiator (or is it the evaporator) that you can see if you shine a flashlight into the front cirbers of the grill...and am using a vacuum with a long narrow fixture to clean it all out.....but are you saying that behind what I can see in there is potentially another accumulation of crud sandwiched in between the radiator and the evaporator? Then the only way to clean this would be taking off the front bumper and getting between the two? All this time I thought that keeping the area clean that you can see back in the corners was all there was to it.

Lena: I'm always so pleased to read/see/hear of folks whose Porsches are into high mileage....because there are just too many discussion threads about this going wrong, or that breaking, or something exploding. I bought a Dodge diesel and it just goes, and goes, and goes....like the battery bunny....but it seems that Porsches....which are supposed to be the ultimate marvel in engineering....are prone to all sorts of catastrophic anomalies. So....back to my original thought....I'm pleased as punch when I see all the comments about high mileage....although I don't consider 50-60K miles to really be high mileage. I'm looking more for the examples in excess of 100K and still going strong on the ORIGINAL engine. Yours falls into that category...congratulations. Chuck

Isn't that picture of the blue cap the older version that was replaced by the "01" that's black? Also, I read somewhere that in addition to cleaning off the debris that collects on the front radiators, that you also have to clean behind them...that there's another A/C evaporator or some such device behind and that debris also gets trapped in there? Loren? Chuck

I don't know what term you might have used in the search engine ...but it's listed In Pelican under Porsche radiator cap for MY99-04 #996-106-447-01-M8 chuck

I don't know....but most of all these scenarios seem to suggest there's an armed robber's accomoplice lurking in the shrubbery waiting for that opportunity to grab your keys. I think you can be cautious, but some of this sounds a bit overly cautious. Whereas I would agree that in this day and age, one can't be too careful, I also feel that when someone meets you for a test drive or perhaps to just discuss your car, you can pretty well assess the person based upon the sorts of things he/she wants to do. It really boils down to common sense. You can pretty well tell the tire kickers....very little discussion, just want to get in it and blast away. Spending about 10 minutes talking to the guy/gal can give you a pretty good idea of where they're coming from. This isn't a universal truth...some folks are pretty slick about this game. I just went and drove an 03 996TT with 8800 miles on it. The neighborhood was extrememly "well heeled". I spoke to the seller for about five minutes after which he informed me that he had to leave, but here are the keys to the car, here is the garage door opener, and to just throw the keys under the garage door as it came down. That's someone who either has implicit faith in his fellow man, has never been the victim of any crime, or "assessed" me to his satisfaction. I'm not sure I would have done the same. Obviously a solo test drive is out of the question....and if I was riding along and the potential buyer "got on it" a little too aggressively, I'd simply say that he's had his one or two shots at acceleration and that my insurance doesn't cover his desire for an Auto X session. Most folks would want to tromp on the accelerator at least once to satisfy themselves that the car has spunk, and in truth, you really have to allow that...but after that, it's the PPI that's going to tell him/her about the mechanical health of the car. Some of these folks are right about YOUR insurance following the car....It certainly makes it more difficult to go after the guy's insurance when you knowingly and willingly let him have the keys....and of course after the accident, and he goes home and has time to think about it...he's going to want out of any financial responsibility....and believe me, he's going to be talking to friends about his complicity and whether he REALLY needs to step up to the plate. He doesn't know you, he has no history or loyalty to you, and unless he's a truly ethical fellow, he will probably start looking for a way out. After that of course you're stuck with the CARFAX report and attendant diminished value because of the accident. I think this all goes back to spending the time up front with the fellow and trying to assess him/her BEFORE you let them into the driver's seat. Granted, all this caution presupposes that you're not stuck with a car that's been advertised for 4 months with no takers. Desperation has the effect of causing a person to throw caution to the winds.