Hi all,

So like many my illuminated sill plates on my 991 have failed. After much searching I couldn’t find anywhere online that showed me what was under them once removed. I was hopeful I could do a repair like you can on some other Porsche’s.

So removal was actually pretty easy!

1) Remove the inner sill, this just pulls off, it’s held on with 4 or so clips, just pull it straight up.




2. Then remove the rubber door/weather seal. Just pull it off by pulling straight up. You will see the white feed for the illuminated strips, indicated by the arrow. The plug for the sill light sits just below the plug for the front and rear hatch, it’s hard to see so I have circled it. I imagine it’s identical to the one on the 981 Caymans that have illuminated sills.





3. This was the bit I was dreading. Removal of sill. I’d seen people make a real mess of this, it’s stuck on with the mother of all sticky 3m tape. For me it was actually pretty easy, probably 5mins! Get a hairdryer (I think a heat gun is too aggressive) and a large trim removal tool. Heat up the strip and push the removal tool under, but go horizontal not lengthways and do a bit of a section at a time. You just need to slide the tool under, no need to lever it as this will damage the sill cover, unless you don’t care because you are replacing.You’ll need some muscle power too. I think the trick here is a nice big trim tool.






4. IMPORTANT! The sill has 2 round locating tabs which I sheared off while removing with the trim tool. The feed wire for the light unit also attaches directly on the underside, so when I pushed the trim tool under, I also sheared this off. It’s not a plug, the wire is directly fed into the light unit and is sealed. It was no big deal because I suspected the units were broken anyway. The below picture shows the underside of the sill, the light unit and the now sheared off wire. You can also see remains of the 3m tape.



As you can see, it’s a sealed unit unfortunately and very specific in size etc. So a cheap fix could be very challenging, albeit not impossible if you have access to 12v lighting components beyond what’s on eBay/Amazon etc. I admitted defeat at this point, it’s beyond my know how. I couldn’t see a supplier or part number on it either.

While the unit was off I tested the feed before unplugging the sheared wire so it didn’t short out. Sure enough, the feed is fine and live when ‘door open’ illuminates other interior lights. So it’s the unit as suspected. Both mine have failed ☹️

A new pair are approx £700 so I need to decide if it means that much to me…. It probably does.

Below you can see I was able to put the sill back on, the old 3m tape was still sticky enough to hold it temporarily while I decide what to do. You can see the sill cover looks ok, it’s got some minor deformation but not much at all and if I did it again, I think I could avoid any damage. I tried different methods before the above such as going lengthways and lifting it up, this is what cause some ‘bending’ of the stainless plate. It was a voyage of discovery!



Hope this helps someone, I spent a long time looking for the above info online, just to understand how they worked. I think the LED or PCB just expires, I see no way it’s caused by water ingress as some forums suggest - the unit is sealed tight.

It’s a pretty bad design really, with some extra thought it could easily be made so the stainless part can be removed and a new light unit put in at a lower cost and labour effort.

Hindsight eh!

 

Thanks for the writeup, info, and sharing.

 

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