A few weeks ago I decided to do some maintenance work on the turbo at my shop. She's got 56xxx miles on her and she's been good to me for many years. I still love her and so I figured its worth doing all the things I've been considering for some time.

No big horsepower numbers to report just a lot of maintenance and attention to detail.

My original plan was to just do the "coolant leak fix" that is common on most mezger engines. For those that dont know, the coolant hoses tend to come off because Porsche thought it would be a good idea to glue aluminum parts together where the hoses connect. So basically you have a rubber hose which clamps on to an aluminum pipe that then gets pushed into (and glued) onto the water pump housing and other areas where coolant is directed. This is a silly idea and Im not sure why they did it.

So that was my original plan but once I saw what needed to be done to just get that taken care of I ended up deciding to replaced every rubber hose on the car, every gasket and seal that could be accessed, struts and springs (lowered), upgraded clutch with new light weight flywheel, all fluids, plugs, coils, and a few other odds and ends items.

I attached some pics so you can see how much needs to be removed to get this little 3.6 out and wedged back in the rear end.

We made a custom engine craddle for this out of wood as you can see. For nearly all of the big engine work that we do at my shop we use an engine hoist, but not many cars have engines in their trunk lol.

Side note: take a look at that clutch (yup 56k miles) and it looks almost as clean as the new one.


I also replaced the 3 small rubber elbow hoses with the metal Sharkwerks version. A bit pricey but a very nice product by Sharkwerks.

I also used the aluminum extensions for the welded components **I forgot who makes them but they are really worth getting because its easier to weld those than the original pipes (which are thinner and less durable for welding).

I attached the parts list for hoses and seals that I replaced as well as a few odds and ends things. I did not add the parts for the clutch upgrade, lwfw, or suspension (all from different sources).

I hope this helps anyone who is about to or thinking about doing the same work. If anyone has any questions I'll be happy to share anything I learned from the experience.

 

Nice work

thanks for sharing

 

wow - awesome work! Not light work in my books! How long did you take to get it all done?

 

to take engine and trans down was approx 4-5hrs (actual time)

to replace all parts took approx 6hrs or so (actual time)

welding was done at a porsche race shop which has a jig to make sure all welds are sealed properly before installing

put engine and trans back in with bumper back together approx. 5hrs

If I had done this more regularly (meaning working on only porsches) I think we could cut that time in half, but being that this is a bit different than the usual work my shop does we took some extra time. Replacing all rubber hoses and seals was time consuming and also because the clutch components were different than the original ones that came out (and again because we havent done it before) it took a bit more time.

 

How long does it take to drop the engine? I've heard it's not bad, about two hours or so.

You should record some of this and post to youtube. Would love to see it all happen live.

 

Look at his first line in his response...above.
"to take engine and trans down was approx 4-5hrs (actual time)"


DC

 

that includes bumper, intercoolers, exhaust, doing it again would probably drop it down to about 3 hrs if you're not trying to win a race.

 

Great post! Lots of good pictures. I am debating on what lift to get that would be sufficient enough to bring the engine down. I wouldn't be able to fit a commercial style lift in my current garage.

 

I do it with a huge floor jack.

 

I recently went through the same dilemma this past summer.

My advice:

MaxJax 2 post mobile hoist link here

and an hydraulic lift table like this

I have this same setup and it works wonders. I do most of my own maintenance. I had to go with a lower height lift because my ceiling was less than 12'

MaxJax has a lifting capacity of 6000lbs. I have lifted 2 vehicles at that weight or slightly below - no issues.