Just Some Simple Maintenance

German cars are notoriously expensive to maintain. One obvious reason is that the parts are usually manufactured overseas, and are not in great supply. I have become convinced, however, that there is another, more sinister cause of high maintainance costs. Those Schwabian pranksters who design Porsches, in particular, seem to take perverse delight in hiding the parts that wear out in the most obscure and difficult to reach places. The 911 is not a large car, and in the nearly 40 years that the original design was produced, the designers devised many clever ways of packaging the various components that became more numerous as time went on. However, clever is not always convenient. Consequently, when the proverbial ten-cent part (ha!) breaks down, you must disassemble the car to get to it.

You think I'm joking. I most assuredly am not. Here is my Memorial Day project:




Behind and below each headlight is a device known as a ballast resistor, a hunk of ceramic about the size of a small cookie with four inches of wire protruding from it. One side works with the oil cooler that is in the lower right front bumper; the other side is part of the air conditioning system that has its condenser in the lower left front bumper area. However, to access these miserable little devices, at a minimum the car must be put on stands, the front wheels removed and the front wheel well liners removed (14 screws total). It doesn't help that on the oil cooler side, the resister is held in place with a nut accessed from below, whereas on the AC side, the resister is fasted with an allen-head bolt accessed from above (I'm sure there are very logical, very German reasons for this). It is said that some can make the repair at that point; however, one would have to have intimate knowledge of each and every milimeter of the inner workings of these systems, and also have hands the size of a newborn. Since most of us do not possess those qualifications, the way the average shade tree mechanic must go about the task is to also remove the entire bumper cover (18 screws total), as well as loosen the oil cooler and AC condenser so they can be moved a critical three inches or so. Even doing that, the resistors can either be seen or touched, but not both at the same time. In fact the oil cooler resistor really can't even be seen very well. In the picture below, even with the oil cooler pulled down a few inches, the resistor is invisible up in a slot between the aluminum-colored object and the painted fender:


Nevertheless, I forged ahead. Five hours to disassemble and reassemble the car, ten minutes total to actually swap out both resistors. I even managed to get everything back together without finding a mysterious surplus of screws at the end of the project, and only forget to reconnect one side marker light (fortunately, I was able to finish the job without further disassembly thanks to one of those long, flexible grabby tools).

It's not setting the timing or replacing a clutch, but the sense of satisfaction is similar, and enough.