EDIT: So I ended up spending alot of time taking pictures and writing this up. I've replaced the original instructions, which I noticed missed a few things, with the latest instructions in the original post to keep from confusing people. If you go further in this thread I ended up posting each numbered point in a post along with PICTURES to help you along your way!!!

So I bought a 996TT back in feb of this year. I picked it up in Denver, Co drove it around for a week in the beautiful mountains and parks around the area, then drove it home to Louisville, KY about 16hrs straight. It was a fun experience.

Within a week of getting home I notice there is a small and light dripping of coolant on the floor when the car sits over night. After some investigation, it appears its coming from the drivers side deep part of the engine. (ie: close to the transmission) Open the engine lid, oh boy. Thats not going to happen. I decided screw it, its not leaking that much, I'll fix it soon but for now I want to enjoy the car I just bought.

So, fast forward to now. Its time to finally fix this thing, and on top of that its due for the 60k service, and I've read enough about the coolant pipe pin problem to be nervous. Time to fix it all in one big swoop.

I looked around for a good write up on pulling the turbo engine, and perhaps my search skills just suck, but I couldn't find one. So, hopefully this helps someone at some point in the future. For reference, I did find the 996 engine pull from pelican parts, but realized it was for a non-turbo which is a bit different.


I looked around for a good write up on pulling the turbo engine, and perhaps my search skills just suck, but I couldn't find one. So, hopefully this helps someone at some point in the future. For reference, I did find the 996 engine pull from pelican parts, but realized it was for a non-turbo which is a bit different.

Estimated time to remove the engine: 8-16 hours (depending on tools, skill level, etc)
Difficultly level 1-10: 8, it’s no more difficult than pulling other engines, but I wouldn’t make this the first engine you ever pull from a car. The only things more difficult are engine disassembly / build, and transmission assembly / build.

1. Row your windows down *slightly*. You are getting ready to unhook the battery and will inevitably get in/out of the car. You don’t want to whap your glass at the top each time since the power won’t be there to automatically row your windows down slightly when you open/close the door.
2. Reach in the car and pop the front and back "hoods"
3. It’s time to go and unhook the battery so you don’t kill yourself later. I unhook the positive only. The battery is located in the front center “trunk” behind the small area that would fit a golf bag, under all that black plastic. Get the center black plastic off and you’ll see it. A wrench on the positive to loosen it and pull it off by hand. As long as your wrench doesn’t touch metal while touching the positive you’ll be fine.
4. Next we’ll raise the car up. If you are one of those fortunate guys that have a lift, we are all ragingly jealous and hate you. You may substitute this step with “I used my lift like a boss” and move to the next one. If you don’t have a lift in your garage, like the rest of us, you’ll be jacking the car up onto 4 jack stands in an agonizingly slow and controlled manner. You are supposed to have jack pads like what a lift would have. (See something like this Amazon.com: ESCO Jack Stand - 3-Ton Capacity, Model# 10498: Industrial & Scientific ) but I didn’t have that. Seeing as how I already have 8 jack stands, I decided to use the 4 extra-large jack stands I do have. So far they are working just fine, and didn’t hurt the factory lift points. Whatever jack stands you go with, make sure they aren’t your normal run of the mill small ones. You are going to be lifting the car up very high and need the stability that the extra-large ones provide. If you use small ones you are asking to die an ironic and agonizing death having been crushed by your childhood dream car later when the engine comes out. Don’t attempt to get your car as high as we’ll need with small stands. When jacking the car up I found the easiest thing to do is to use a thin piece of wood and jack from the front frame rail on one side. This will lift the entire front, driver and passenger. Get it high enough to put jack stands on the front, then go to the back and jack from the rear sub-frame behind the rear wheel. That'll get the back up. Then go back and forth slowly raising the car higher and higher front to back. You’ll want to get the bottom of the body 19-22 inches in the air. The higher the better. Mine sat at 19.5. It took me more than an hour being careful. You don’t want to go out but a click or two on the stands each time else you risk the car falling to the side being leaned on. If you’re car falls it’s going to be some expensive damage, so take this warning seriously. Once it’s to the desired height, push on the side of the car a bit and ENSURE it’s up there stable. The last thing you want is this thing falling on you, or teeter tottering later due to shifting weight. If it’s all good, it’s time to celebrate! If not, the jacks aren’t on the same stop, or your floor isn’t level. Figure it out, but make sure it’s safe and the car won’t fall else you are risking death. Getting the car this high in the air is one of the more agonizing moments. Time to start getting it ready to come out.
5. Remove the rear deck lid. It can be easily removed by unplugging the electrical connector on the passenger side, and unbolting the 4 bolts holding the hinge. You’ll want a helper for this so that when you unbolt one side you can easily control the deck lid without damaging it or your paint.


6. Remove the rear wheels.

7. Remove the “rear” rear fender liner. You’ll need to remove it for access, and also to get the rear bumper off. It’s held on by a lot of screws.



8. Remove the tail lights. This step is kind of optional I believe, but it was stupid simple to do, and made for a good place to sit tools for me. The tail lights are held in by two screws around the bottom right and left of the engine opening. The tail lights should just come out with ease after they are removed. Make sure you sit them some place that won’t get them broken.


9. Remove the rear bumper. Remove the license plate frame, and any rear bumperettes you have. I had the two near the rear license plate frame. They were held in by one bolt each.


Once that’s out of the way, the rear bumper is held on by 4 bolts in the top middle ¬¬of it, and on each side, one in the top at the edge (near the rear wheel) and two on the bottom edge (also near the rear wheel)
¬¬

Vertical view of the side of the bumper. The far is the bottom, the close is the top




10. Remove the exhaust. This is held in by being bolted to the turbos and some weird strap mechanism that seems kind of overly complicated considering it results in a solid mount. (Why not just use some bolts to solid mount it Porsche, come on) You'll want to unbolt the exhaust from the turbos first. There are 4 nuts on each turbo. The exhaust won’t fall don’t worry. After that, onto the straps. To get to the straps you'll need to remove the heat shields. Take care to break as few heat shield bolts as you can. If you are in no rush, some PB blaster on them and take a break here is a good plan. If not… be really careful, they break easy and are probably corroded on there. Once the heat shield is off you'll see the straps on each side. Unbolt these and slide the straps to the outside of the car. Eventually it'll come off the big metal tabs and the exhaust will fall into your lap. Take care, it’s rather bulky and heavy for what it is.
The heat shields you’ll be taking off





11. Time to remove the hoses connecting the turbos to the intake plumbing. Since you’ve removed the rear “rear fender” cover, you have access via the wheel well. You have the turbo compressor outlet going into the intercooler, and you have the intake piping to remove. All in all, only 3 clamps on each side then pull the pipe off.

12. Get on your creeper and under the car, it’s time to remove some stuff down here now. Get an allen head socket and unbolt the axles from the tranny. Using the e-brake to hold the axles from moving is a good idea here while you break these allen bolts loose. If you’ve got a helper, have them sit in the driver’s seat for you to control the e-brake. E-brake up while you break them loose, then e-brake down, rotate, up, break more loose, repeat until they are all loose.


13. Remove the shifter linkage. It just pops off the tranny if you have a nice fork type tool. Just put the ball in between the fork and pry lightly. It’s a ball joint style connection. The connections on the fork arms you see in the picture are designed to slide in and then be locked in place by the metal spring things and are common on a lot of cars. On my 996 they slide out of the fork with a flat head screw driver before the springs came off though.


14. Remove the positive from the starter. Make sure you've unhooked the battery before this or "you're going to have a bad time"


15. You'll want to remove the under body plastics to get access to unhook the drive shaft. There are three underbody plastics under the car in total you’ll need to eventually unhook. I haven’t noted all of the nuts to remove in the pictures because there are tons, but you’ll easily figure it out. They are all 10mm socket heads




16. There is a brace connecting the transmission mount to the uni-body. You’ll need to remove that too. There are 4 nuts and 2 bolts holding it in place. The transmission won’t fall, don’t worry. This is just an extra brace to limit movement during use.

17. There are 3 bolts for the drive shaft to the transmission. Get it unhooked. After this you'll need to pry lightly and it'll push towards the front of the car and far enough away from your tranny to be out of the way. I used a small pry bar here. Don’t force it, it should just move without much effort.


18. There are diagonal sub-frame braces in the back. They run from the rear sub-frame up to about the rear jack stand points. Remove them by removing the nut on the top in the middle of each, and the bolt in the end of each. They are structural braces and don’t hold anything so you should be safe. Once the nut and two bolts are removed you are safe to pull downward. They have a semi-tight rubber bushing holding them in. Just pull downward.


Off the car here is what they look like. Note the two rubber bushings. One has a nut on top, the other is just a locating bushing.


19. If you haven’t already, drain the oil, and coolant from the engine before you forget. Also drain the transmission fluid and coolant too. You can theoretically leave the oil and tranny fluid in, but if you plan to remove the tranny, or do almost anything to the engine they will need to be emptied. (If you aren’t doing anything to either, why are you removing the engine?)
20. There is flat brace going from one side to the other of the front of the rear sub-frame. It’s held in by a bolt on each side. Remove them, then the brace and sit it off to the side and out of the way.

21. There are a few very obvious coolant lines in the way running under the transmission. There are two small ones that run in a “Z” shape, and two large ones. Unhook all of these. You are likely to make a mess at this point, I'd have a garage mop ready. Now would be the perfect time to mop so it can be drying.


22. Time to unhook the clutch slave cylinder. Two 15mm wrenches, and It’s easy to do

23. There is a sensor in the front of the transmission. Remove the electrical connector from the sensor

24. We are done on the floor under the car for a bit. Let’s get a bit more room to work in the bay, shall we? The engine mounts to the big metal plate you'll see in the back. It’s the same metal plate that the exhaust straps wrapped around. (kind of) The plate bolts into the engine mounts.

The rear sub-frame has a mount running across the middle held in by two bolts on each side. It connects effectively to where the control arms do. Probably a brace to keep the control arm points from flexing under load. Make sure it’s there, we are going to lower the engine to sit on it for a minute.


Sitting the engine on it will give us a good 4 inches in the bay to work and disconnect stuff. The big metal bracket the engine is mounted to is connected to the rubber mounts by a nut on each side. You can access this from the bottom with an extension. Don’t do it yet though! Unlike everything else we’ve unhooked, this time you are dealing with heavy stuff that will fall. You'll want to get a jack under the engine to ensure it doesn’t fall before removing either bolt. Find a safe place on the bottom of the engine and raise your jack until you have light pressure pushing up on the engine. Note too much though, you don’t want to pick your car off the jack stands. Once you have the nuts removed, slowly lower the jack. Your engine will eventually come to sit on the brace. You now have more room up top in the bay to work and shouldn’t have lowered enough to stretch anything.
25. Let’s go up top for a bit now. Remove the airbox assembly if you haven’t already. Its only a few bolts and is really easy to figure out. Unhook your intake pipes. These are held in with a kind of neat clip and o-ring setup. Just pull the clip and it'll come right out on both sides with some wiggling.

26. Unhook the gas feed from the fuel filter on the driver’s side of the bay. Take care not to ruin any lines and use two separate wrenches to hold it in place while turning. Also unhook the coolant overflow tank, and the other two lines I’ve put red marks on below.

27. There is one large coolant line on the driver’s side of the engine bay. It’s held in with the same kind of clip mechanism as the air pipes were. Remove it. If you look next to it there is also a smallish coolant hose running towards the bottom of the engine (not shown in the picture) follow it. It ends up connecting to the water pump. You’ll want to remove this hose and pull up and out of the way. Note, mop any mess you make up here too!






28. Time to go over to the passenger side and remove a bunch of stuff now. Some people remove the hydraulic pump and A/C pump and don’t crack them open. My A/C needed recharged anyway being 14 years old and low, and it seemed more effort than I desired to remove them in the car. So I just broke open the connection. Your choice on what to do. I removed the two hydraulic lines, and the two A/C lines as shown. While you are over here you can also unplug the two large mil-spec electrical quick disconnects. There is one more little electrical connector near the mil-specs. Unplug that too. I couldn’t find it in the pic to show you with engine in. I included a picture of it with engine out to show you the thing I’m talking about. You’ll also want to remove the passenger coolant hose while over here.


29. Put an impact on the large nut on the end of the axle. It’ll come right off. Do this to both sides.

30. You’ll need to get the axles out of your way now. You’ll already removed the allen head bolts holding the axles to the tranny. Now you need the axles out of your way, which necessitates unhooking some suspension arms. (It’s possible the axles could stay in, but it seemed like more headache than it was worth when lowering my engine considering axles are ~$900 to replace if you goof them up.) The minimum I needed to remove were 3 arms, and the bottom of the shock. The top two arms are simple, a wrench and a ratchet on each side of the bolt, remove it. The shock is the same. The arm on the bottom was a bit harder. You can easily remove the nut on top, but it’s difficult to get it out. There is a torx input on the top of it. Using the torx likely won’t work since it’s so small. You can’t use a torch because it’s got a rubber boot. I find when I use a pickle fork it tears boots. I ended up using a small punch that fit inside of the torx bit section and hit that punch with a sledge hammer. That loosened it and out it came. Do this to both sides. On the passenger side you’ll see a small connector to a sensor that senses movement of the control arms. You’ll want to unhook this with its little 10mm nut and pull it off too.




31. With the suspension unhooked, I used a long pry bar to pull the suspension upright back and gain enough room to push the axle out and then remove it completely.

32. Next I jacked the engine back onto the mounts and put the nuts back on. I removed the cross brace that we sat the engine on earlier. There is nothing holding the engine in now except the transmission mounts up front and the big two bolts in the back.

33. I got a table to help with my lowering. http://www.harborfreight.com/1000-lb...0438-9328.html I can’t imagine the two jack method not being terrible. As much money as you are saving by doing this yourself, you might as well buy the table. I used wood on the table to make it "fit" the bottom of the engine. Jack the table up until it barely pushes up on the engine. My wood blocks were on each side of the engine pushing on the bottom of the heads on each side.

34. Remove the two engine mounts, and there are two mounts for the tranny at the very front you should also remove. Now all weight is on the table.

35. Lower the engine / tranny combo slowly until you are just a few inches below where it was when it was sitting on the cross brace. You want to be careful here, this thing is really heavy and has the ability to knock your car off the jack stands and cause disaster or even worse, death. STAY OUT FROM UNDER THE CAR while you are lowering. I don’t want to hear someone was following this tutorial and killed themselves.

36. You are a few inches lower than with the cross brace. Go to the driver’s side of the engine bay looking from under / behind the engine mount. There is a second fuel line that wasn’t easy to get to earlier. It’s held in with a 10mm bolt and a seal. Remove the 10mm bolt and pull it out.

37. Go to the passenger side, you should be able to find a ground wire that goes from the engine to the body. Remove it.

38. Repeat slowly moving a couple of inches down. Once you have enough room up in the engine compartment to be able to see the back stop. This should only be another 2-3 inches at most. You need to unhook the blow off valves, and intake tract. You’ve probably noticed by now that Porsche made the intake tract run through the rear sub-frame, and then bolted those pieces to the engine. (WTF Porsche) We are going to unhook the intake tract so that it stays in the bay while the engine comes down. In the bay unscrew the worm clamp and pull the passenger plastic intake pipe off of the big aluminum piece. Also remove the allen head bolt holding the big aluminum piece in place. There is also a line running from the oil reservoir and the aluminum thing. Remove the clamp there to. Unscrew the worm clamp in the front of the aluminum piece and pull the blow off valves off of it. The aluminum piece should be loose now.


You won’t be able to get the aluminum intake piece out right now, but I thought it would help if you knew the shape of the thing you are dealing with so I’ve attached it.


Ditto you won’t be able to get the Plastic passenger side thing out of the car so I have attached a pic of what it looks like to help you.


Eventually the setup will look like the picture with it all unhooked I’ve attached


39. Keep repeating the lower a few inches, and check routine. Go slowly, and check around a lot for anything that you are missing, or anything that might be being pushed on, cracked, or broken. Porsche parts are pricey, you don’t want to break stuff.
40. Keep going down a few inches at a time and checking. Eventually you'll have the table all the way down to its lowest point. If you are only 19-22 inches on the jack stands you’ll notice that this isn’t low enough.

41. Assuming everything is unhooked, you now need to raise the car high enough to roll the engine out. I went slowly, and got my rear jack stands up nearly all the way. I didn’t tell you to do this earlier because jack stands tend to get kind of iffy at their max height. This gave me plenty of room to roll the engine out. If you remove the oil fill cap you’ll gain an inch or two that the car doesn’t need to come up further. Once the engine was out I then put the rear jack stands down a few notches so they were stable.


42. You are done!




All in all, having now done this, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Porsche clearly spent time to make it *relatively* easy to drop the engine. Nice of them considering they designed it to need the engine out for most services!


Hopefully this was helpful to someone at some point.

 

Pictures for reference

 

More reference pictures

 

thats it for now folks. I'll be doing all the things to it I can whiles its out, then I'll snap some pictures on its way back in!

 

Wow, that's a big job, but I see you have a couch in the shop to take naps between the hard parts. :-)

 

Swap,that coolant reservoir while you're in there and it's easy, looks like it's starting to go yellow. Really appreciate the detail!

 

For sure. I've got a brand new oem coolant reservoir already sitting in a box with other parts. I think I'll replay most all the coolant hoses too since they are so hard to get to

 

Take step by step pictures of the re-install. Then we can disassemble in reverse order.

Thanks for the great how to write up. Was it done by memory? Or did you take the time and write it all down on a note pad in between steps?

Curious to know what all you have plan on doing now that in engine is out, besides the coolant tube pinning? Welding?

 

very good write up !did mine last fall for rods faillure (about 8hr labor to put it down)but let my ac and PS tied up to the car!hopefully getting my engine back very shortly! will be watching your next steps Mate!
+1

 

rep pts great write up indeed.

 

I was getting the anxiety sweats just reading this write up. You guys who aren't afraid of doing this kind of work are my heroes.

 

Next time unbolt the p/s and the a/c and lay them outside the car hoses attached. No need to lose any freon or p/s fluid. alsp no need to remove the exhaust. it can be done later
and i feel your pain! but a lift makes it soon much easier! the 2 jack method is fine not hard at all. as you can see i tried both ways.

 

Nice write-up - you made it look easy!

 

Excellent job!

 

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