Great DYI!

 

Thanks!

I did some baking last year and I have been dragging my feet on sharing the "recipe" here with 6speed

 

nice! but I prefer the red cookies.

 

Not on a yellow 911 though!

 

Ok, fuel filter pics!

Close-up of what it looks like at 48K miles after having nothing but 93 octane in it in FL since I bought it at 24K miles (no idea what fuel it had in NJ):

 

Thank you for sharing th DIY. My car is at 47k so I am getting ready to do the same. Did you do the plugs yet? How bad was it really?

 

Funny you should ask... Yes, I did the plugs.

It was an absolute nightmare.

First, it's already a ***** of a job if everything goes WELL.

Here is what you may be facing on a 911 TT nearing 50K on the clock:

BROKEN BOLTS.

Holy mother of god this turned a job that was pretty rough into one of the worst DIY experiences of my life.

My car lived the first 24K miles of it's life up north and the later half here in FL.

The passenger side of the car was actually fine, but the driver's side probably saw about 4 bolts just break right off.

The only way I was able to get through this was with the help of the owner Todd of a local "do it yourself" garage that I took my car to here in Miami, Garage Yourself (www.garageyourself.com). <-- Now, that was quite an easy "plug" job

I went to his place to do the work and I'm not an expert with extractors -- fortunately he had the tools to get the broken bolts out. Some of them were incredibly difficult.

Getting the pipes pulled out of the Turbo can also be be challenging as the ones on the top don't just pull out easily and you have very little room to work to remove them. I devised a pretty clever method using first trying zip ties then moving to safety wire that saw me wrap the wire around the pipes, then creating some additional loops placed around the end of a pry bar which I was then able to 'hois' up the pipes out of the housing. Difficult to describe but it will make sense if you are in there working on it...

You should replace the rubber seals on your coolant/oil pipes, so make sure you have a set of those handy. Only two pipes actually had visibly worn rubber seals, but you may as well do all of them. I do not have the part numbers handy for them.

You also need to be prepared to take a literal bath in coolant when you take out the coolant line of your first turbo. This part was definitely not mentioned in the DIY here! Make sure you have a catch can ready to get what might be a half liter to a liter of coolant out as soon as you remove the line. Oil lines were not pressurized so you just need to stop them up with something.

Based on my experience, there is no way in hell the dealer did my plugs this way for my last Major Service -- they must do it in a manner that does not require any dis-assembly of the Turbo coolant pipes and VTGs.

The clearances for the bolts are sometimes very small, so we had to do a good bit of machine work on replacement bolts to get them to fit back in (obviously we didn't have official Porsche bolts handy).

I think if you are doing this job you may want to figure out a way to get a completely new set of bolts to put back in.

I do not think I will try this DIY again.

 

OMG. No way I am going to attempt this job on my own. I am handy but I do not want to be crying in my garage all alone. .

 

If I was on my own with this, I would have thrown in the towel after the second broken bolt and just flat bedded my car in - Porsche spark plugs 1, Ben 0. The GarageYourself shop had all the tools to get out the bolts fortunately and as I mentioned the owner helped immensely and saved me the embarrassment.

OH... another good tip not mentioned in the DIY for anyone who attempts it:

Getting the bolts out of the VTG can be made somewhat 'easier' if you have really tiny little ratchet - I'm talking a few inches long, one you may get in a tiny screw driver / bit set. I'll try to snap a pic of the one I used in a bit.

 

Well good for you for doing it yourself. That sounds like a pretty cool place (the diy garage).

 

Were you able to do the belt replacement on your own? I do not see a DIY for the belt replacement but I assume it would be fairly straight forward. I think I am going to do both myself and figure it out. I called Porsche and they want $1400 for the plugs and $390 for the belt replacement which I feel is way too high.

 

I echo djben, I too did this on my old blue car, it was a *****. The dealer just drops the motor and tyranny.

 

I just removed all of my intake piping today searching for a coolant leak.. As far as I could tell that's all you'd need to do to change the belt and it only took me like 30 mins to get everything removed. Anyone correct me if I'm wrong. I now feel stupid paying for some of the services that I did at a local indy shop...

 

So true!

 

Yep, I did the belt replacement.

While putting leverage on the bar that is attached to the tensioner pulley, I somehow snapped off the nut on the lever. Fortunately you can put your ratchet right on the bolt that holds the tensioner pulley to get it to move if this happens to you.

The new belt was tough to get on. You have to make sure you get *every* bit of slack out before you try and loop it over the last pulley. I have read that heating it up with a hair dryer can help but honestly I don't think it is going to stretch that much since it is made to be pretty heat resistant.

Make sure you take pictures of exactly how the belt is setup before you remove it, the thing snakes around a lot

I don't think it is worth paying $390+tax for.

Going to have to look into how difficult it is to do a partial engine drop next time I have to do a spark plug change. Like some other other maintenance items in this thread, there isn't a 997.1 TT partial engine drop DIY anywhere on the internet.

I have already changed my engine mounts so I'm at least familiar with *one* part of the process