An unexpected Porsche headache this morning, as the Cayenne left me stranded at the LPG pump with a flat battery. It had started OK on quite a cold morning and I’d driven the fifteen miles or so to the station with dipped headlamps on due to fog. I left the sidelights on with the engine off while I filled up but, when I was finished, the Big Pig wouldn’t crank enough to start the engine. Five minutes with sidelights on had drained whatever voltage was left in the battery.
I always carry jump leads, so I borrowed the working car of a friendly passer-by and got a jump start: it fired up straight away. I drove around the corner to the local Euro Car Parts and bought a new Bosch S4 019 battery to replace the non-Bosch item I had fitted just over a year ago: £104.40 including VAT, which was not too bad for a big battery with four-year guarantee.
The old battery had been a bit of a worry since Christmas, when I had to jump start the car a couple of times after it had been standing for a few weeks. Although my 2004 Porsche Cayenne S has now done 154,000 miles and is still on its original water-cooled alternator, diagnostics showed no problem with the alternator and all the wiring looked OK, so it had to be a battery problem.
When I first bought the car, it had a great Bosch S5 Silver battery fitted. I had a few things play up a bit including the starter and forum wisdom suggested the battery was at fault. Euro Car Parts could supply a Lion battery with slightly more amp hours (100Ah/800 CCA) than a new Bosch S4 (95Ah/800 CCA) and a three-year guarantee, so I bought one and fitted it. Of course, it made little or no difference, but I left it in there. I’m sure I still have the old Bosch S5 battery somewhere, which would no doubt still work perfectly but anyway, the deed is done.
Today was a busy day for the Cayenne trailering 911s up and down the country. It behaved perfectly all day after I had changed the batteries over, so I am hoping this issue is now resolved. It feels better to have a Bosch part back on the car – Porsches never seem to work right with anything else. I’ll claim on the three-year guarantee for the dud one so it should all work out.
How to change/replace your Porsche Cayenne Battery
Tools:
M10 multispline 3/8 socket & ratchet
10mm 3/8 socket
10mm spanner
Most Porsche Cayenne 955 (Gen 1) models have a single large battery under the left front seat: that is the passenger seat on a right-hand drive car. The seat base lifts up on a pair of rear-mounted hinges to allow access to the battery box. The multispline M10 bolts which hold the front of the seat frame down are under the two plastic covers in front of the seat: these just clip off to reveal the bolt heads.
Undo the bolts and tilt the seat up: hold it up out of the way with a strap to the grab handle if you’re worried. Now you can see the battery cover, which has four clips, one in each corner: undo those and lift the cover off. Your 10mm spanner will undo the terminals (remove earth first), and the 10mm socket will undo the front corner bracket, and the big side clamp holding the battery in place. If you’re worried about losing your radio settings etc, connect a battery charger to the terminals before you unhook them.
Once the two clamps are off and the terminals have been detached and secured out of the way, disconnect the small battery vent hose and get the old battery out of there. It is worth cleaning any dirt and dust out of the battery tray before sliding the new battery in.
A bit of petroleum jelly on the terminals before connection is an old-school habit, but not too important in these days of sealed batteries that do not give off corrosive vapours when charging. Then reconnect everything, put the lid down and bolt the seat back to the floor: use a bit of blue Loctite on the seat bolts. Have a cup of tea & a decent biscuit – you just saved yourself a few quid by not going to a dealer.
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Amongst the cool projects I’ve been party to this year is the latest reproduction from EB Motorsport: a flat-fan kit for air-cooled Porsche engines. Under development for the last two years, engineering for a flat fan kit started in the same way as most of the EB Motorsport product range: there was nothing else out there that did the job properly.
Porsche 911 RSR Turbo Replica
I’m not quite sure when EB’s Mark Bates decided he had to have a Porsche 911 RSR Turbo, but we definitely had a conversation about building a 2.1-litre Turbo replica soon after we started working together more than five years ago and the bodywork for the project is well under way (pic below). Since our first conversation, the EB Motorsport product range has expanded to include a lot of products that cross over from RSR to RSR Turbo, but the flat fan is all on its own when it comes to cool Porsche kit.
“If I could have bought a flat fan kit that looked correct and worked well at a sensible price, I wouldn’t have gone down the road of making it myself,” says Mark. “We did buy one kit but it was not what I was looking for, so we ended up doing it the long way.
Mark’s ‘long way’ would be most impossible for most of us, but nothing phases EB Motorsport. When your company has more than sixty years of experience manufacturing food-grade handling plant, including 30-metre-high composite silos that can hold tons upon tons of raw material, the minor details of re-manufacturing unobtainable throttle bodies, complex fuel pressure regulators and flat fan drives are not a big deal.
Flat Fan Components and Testing
That said, all high-end manufacturing takes time to do properly, and this has been done properly. The first step was to find a period composite fan, as making the tooling to replicate an air-cooled flat fan blade is not the work of a moment. That search came up empty handed, so a high-quality carbon fan was obtained that would hold up for testing. “Our own fan is in development, but it involves the most complex tooling we have ever designed,” says Mark. “It will take a while to get this bit right.”
The next step was the fan drive. The obvious way to recreate one of these was to buy an original 935 drive and reverse engineer it, so this is what happened. The process took six months, and the first test device was fitted to a static long block test rig earlier this year, connected to electric motors and tested for hours on end. EB measured details like noise, durability, horsepower consumption, backlash, shim dimensions and airflow with different internal diverters fitted to the custom EB fan shroud.
Flat Fan Horsepower Consumption
Testing revealed lots of interesting data, particularly in the areas of air flow and horsepower. “It’s long been rumoured that the flat fan costs a lot of horsepower due to the convoluted drivetrain, but a vertical fan will also cost horsepower,” says Mark. “Our testing proved that flat fan horsepower consumption was not linear but instead it increased exponentially. At 4k fan rpm, just 1.5 horsepower was lost, but at 12k rpm fan speed which is roughly 8k rpm engine speed, 32 horsepower was lost, mainly due to the volume of air being moved by the fan. Given the increased thermal protection to cylinders 1 and 4 offered by the flat fan installation, we’re comfortable with the test data.”
Tuthill Porsche Flat Fan 911
The video below shows the flat fan fitted to EB’s 2.5-litre ST engine on carbs, in a 911 supplied for road testing by Richard Tuthill. Tuthill Porsche will build the engine for the RSR Turbo replica and there’s even some discussion on building a short run of four RSR Turbo replicas, including EB Motorsport’s own car, all running flat fans and fun-horsepower big turbo engines. Now that would really be cool.
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In the week that German prosecutors suspended investigations into twelve members of the Porsche supervisory board accused of 2008 stock market manipulation by a number of hedge funds, I resolved the battle between my Porsche 944 and a Worcestershire hedge.
Long-time readers will remember that I bought this early 944 on eBay in 2007, and collected it from Chichester, where it had lain unloved in a leaky garage for more than ten years. It was a case of out of the frying pan into the fishery for the 944, as I parked it on a friend’s farm & fishing lake, where it was subsequently absorbed into the landscape. Now he wants his farmyard back to build a house on, the 944 had to be dragged out of the way.
Arriving at the farm with Rob Campbell of Porsche bodywork restorers, Racing Restorations, both he and my farmer mate were sure that the car would be ruined after five years sitting in the brambles. Obviously I was on the 944’s side: I knew it had survived.
We set about pulling the hedge apart, but the farmer insisted we leave it alone so it looked better after the car was removed – hilarious given the state of the place, but he is the boss. I shifted a few thorns out of the way and hooked a chain onto the front anti-roll bar, we attached that to a tractor and the car was pulled free. Nothing like a nice bit of weekend gardening.
The 944 looks fine: plenty of dirt but there’s no more rust than it had when it was parked up. One sill is holed and the battery tray still leaks: we can easily sort all that out. I need to find a bit of storage near either Banbury or Daventry where the 944 can sit until my garage gets a roof on next month, then it can come home for a bit and I’ll do a few jobs, such as fitting a repaired fusebox and loom and trying to get it started.
Here’s some video of the moment when it was pulled from the undergrowth. A female friend compared it to childbirth: yikes!
Not had much time for blogging lately as I’ve been doing more building at home, continuing the office and garage extension (codename Porschehaus) that fell by the wayside when the original Ferdinand owners went bust, owing quite a lot of money to me and many others. It’s taken a while to get finances back up to speed, but lots of good things are now happening and the project is moving again.
I find building very satisfying. My Victorian house was built in the late 19th century, so part of the joy is in chasing materials: architectural salvage from hundreds of years ago. Unearthing a stash of two thousand bricks from the same kiln that fired my own house was a result, as was winning a truckload of blue ridge tiles for just 99p and paying the same for barn skylight windows (for parts).
I cursed a bit (ok, a lot) when I missed a round cast-iron Victorian window on eBay but have found a good skip guy, concrete supplier and source of steel beams not far from my house. Researching the best sources is all part of the fun when putting this stuff together, but it does eat time in the process. All this will sound very familiar to classic Porsche people.
Part of the fun of Porsche ownership has long been finding the parts to go with them, but as prices for cars have all gone through the roof, parts prices have soared, too. Gone are the days when a pair of Fuchs could be bought for £350, or a nice old pair of Recaros snapped up for less than £100. I sold quite a chunk of my parts stash for that sort of money to pay the mortgage when I first went freelance five years ago, but I still have a few bits remaining. Now that the Porschehaus project is back up to speed, I’m excited to plan for my parts to come home, as well as the cars, of course.
While dreaming of where this stuff will go, I had an email about a new Porsche-inspired lifestyle brand someone wanted me to look at. It made me wonder where the line was between gathering Porsche cars and parts with the odd bit of memorabilia, and adhering to the doctrine of a Porsche “lifestyle brand”?
I’ve made a few runs of Porsche-themed t-shirts and the odd grille badge over the years, but all that stops well short of defining a lifestyle. Friends often say my lifestyle is more pikey* than Porsche, which is probably fair enough, given the brick dust, Jack Russell Terrier, Irish accent and their lack of imagination (you know who you are).
I understand the attraction to branding, but the idea that people would define their whole lifestyle by the car they drive seems quite restrictive. I doubt that a majority of my classic Porsche friends would call their car a lifestyle choice: it is not about ticking each box in a catalogue.
Old-school Porsche boys got by without worrying too much about what t-shirts to wear when driving their cars. No doubt we are all bound by this cult, but don’t get bogged down in where “people like us” go or what we should be wearing. There are more books to read, more bricks to lay and many more cars to enjoy before our time here expires. Keep the faith, but don’t do it blindly.
* US readers, I don’t know what your equivalent of a pikey would be: perhaps a wheeler-dealer crossed with a hobo. Submit your definitions!
This smart Porsche 356 Carrera 2 is currently going back together following a forty-year spell as a project car. Owned by the right reverend Francis Tuthill, the main man took it apart in the 1970s when it had a bit of rust in the sills. It’s taken a mere four decades to find time to put it back together.
Before the 356 boys chime in with a million questions, I don’t have all the details to hand at present: it was a flying visit en route to somewhere else when Francis grabbed me with the usual: “you don’t want to be taking pictures of that. I’ll show you the real story.” One does not refuse such offers.
I hear this car is one of four right-hand drive cars manufactured: other sources reckon there were six. This is not Fran’s only four-cam project and it is going back together to be driven, although I don’t quite know where to at the minute. I’ll definitely be blagging a spin in it when done.
The Carrera 2 remains a rare bird, especially in right-hand drive. Fuhrmann’s four-cam engine reached its peak here in the Type 587 version: 1966cc of revvy flat four, delivering around 130 bhp.
The engine is shown here in a stand, which is where most servicing must be done with the four-cams. Wider than the normal engines, these four-cams come out when its time to do the plugs: hence why Francis called me down for a look. “You won’t see a thing when this is back in the car.”
I do like the Porsche 356. It still has such a great shape and Carreras were right on the pace of the early 911s: one reason there was so much dissent when the 356 was displaced by the new boy. Driving a ‘regular’ 356 is easy, relaxed, evocative. Light, direct steering and a welcoming cabin makes a very comfortable environment for mile after mile. How much it changes with a four-cam, I hope to report sometime soon.
Spent a morning this week at Tuthill Porsche, watching a proper 3.0 911 RSR engine go together. The most interesting thing about this engine is it was built using rare factory sand-cast engine cases: something apart from the norm and a nice link to RSR heritage.
Richard Tuthill has always promised to help with a top end rebuild on my Carrera 3.0 engine, currently resting with tired valve guides and a cracked head stud. The C3 engine has much in common with the RSR motor, so there was plenty on this build that would also apply to my own. I’d seen these cases when they first arrived in the parts washer, so looked forward to watching them come back to life: it was going to be educational.
Engine builder Anthony served as Francis’ apprentice and has since built countless Porsche engines and transmissions, using a mix of Fran’s teachings and knowledge gleaned from other engine gurus. It will be a few years before he has the wrinkles to countenance his impressive store of knowledge, but no doubt he’s en route to the top of his field.
As you’d expect, this was not the first time the race engine had been stripped, and some bits needed a rethink. When the original crank was found to need oversize bearings at three grand a set from our German friend, it made more sense to keep the ancient crank safe, and prepare a new crankshaft to RSR spec.
The 6-bolt crankshaft was knife-edged, polished and nitrided (hardened in a 72-hour process) before being fitted with the original connecting rods. These were original and I thought quite lovely. Edges had been ground and polished before the rods were shot peened: nothing overly dressy. These engines are all about go, not show.
One illuminating job on the crankshaft assembly was stretching the rod bolts using a rod bolt stretch gauge. The bolts are at max clamp load when stretched by 10 thousandths of an inch, so Anthony’s junior held the ARP gauge while the bolts were stretched up to spec.
With the crankshaft assembled, the builder spent a long time cleaning and lubricating the first case half, installing oil seals, oil pump, timing chains and intermediate shaft before dropping the crank in, adding more seals, using a variety of sealants to prep the case further, then turning his attention to the other case half.
This was given the same close attention: lots of cleaning, lubrication and then a different sealant. When everything was ready, the case halves were joined together and Anthony worked quickly to get it all buttoned up while the sealant was curing. Next job was to install pistons and cylinders and measure the heights and CCs, so they could be sent off for finishing. More on that next time (it’s good).
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