1999 Porsche 986 Boxster 2.5
Discussion
There’s been a few of these old Boxster’s showing up in Readers Cars of late so thought it would be good to introduce my own spin on a bit of Poverty Pork.
I’ve got a bit of experience with the 986/996 platform, this is my second 986, and you can read about my 3.7 996 over here: https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&...
As my 996 has slowly become a bit more focused (and valuable), I fancied another Porsche to be able to tool about in without worrying too much about it. If it cost peanuts to buy and run, and had a 1000 mile sunroof, then that was a bonus. As I know the platform so well I also knew that I could look after another one of these cars without too much bother and, as a bonus, already had a bunch of spares knocking around.
Now, as everyone knows, to get a cheap convertible you should really buy in winter, so I started scouring the bargain basement of the automotive world, Facebook Marketplace, around Christmas time. I had a strict search criteria. The car had to be a 986. Had to be a 2.5 (I’d always heard good things about the engine/gearbox combo and the 2.5’s have all the right IMS bearings etc) and had to be cheap. I set my max budget at £3k and waited to see what sort of scabby old Porsche’s turned up.
Then, in early Jan, this hovered into view:
]
Doesn’t look too bad, right? It was up for £2.5k on 90k miles and the pics gave me a bit of confidence it wasn’t a complete nail. On the bad side it had no MOT (though a fairly clean history…), and the last one expired in July 2021. It had zero service history, and the paint was described as ‘not perfect’ in the badly written ad. Sounds like a perfect candidate for a bargain.
Few messages exchanged with the seller, and a viewing was agreed. To the sellers credit I couldn’t see the car until the weekend but, because I was first, he agreed to hold it for me despite him saying his ‘phone was ringing off the hook’. Likely story….
When I turned up the car looked quite a bit different to the ad (always the way….) and it turned out the pics he used to show the car off were from when he bought it in March 2020. Not a good start. Since then the poor old girl had clearly lived a little bit of a hard life. The seller had bought it during the first lockdown, used it for a year to mess about in, bought a Cayman as a second toy, started using that instead, and the old Boxster got laid up. She was parked up covered in dust/dirt from the lock up, wheels were a bit tatty with knackered tyres, and there were plenty of small bumps and dings on the body/bumpers.
The battery was as flat as a pancake (adding to the parts list straight away…), but the car fired up from cold straight away with a booster pack, and settled to a nice smooth idle. No nasty noises, no puddles of oil underneath it. Even sounded pretty good burbling away with the standard exhaust.
Seller then casually mentioned it ‘seems to leak a bit of coolant from the expansion tank’ which in reality meant that the boot carpet was swimming with water. It had clearly been leaking for a while and he had been topping it up over and over. Might have been handy to mention that in the ad. Job and parts list growing.
Seller had also said that he had fitted a clutch and slave cylinder to it when he bought it and while it all worked, car went into any gear without any nasty noises, the clutch pedal felt AWFUL. Super light and very, very short travel. I know that bleeding these up can be a pain so assumed they hadn’t done a good enough job of bleeding the slave. Not a deal breaker.
The interior was fairly grotty and dirty, the cloth seats were rank and need a serious wet vac, but it was all in one piece. Unfortunately while poking around inside it became clear that the roof wasn’t working. Also not mentioned in the ad. “I swear it worked last time I used it’. Annoying.
Opening the roof latch would get the windows to drop as the should, but despite handbrake being on and car stopped, pressing the button on the dash resulted in absolutely nothing. On the plus side a load of nasty grinding would have suggested a broken mechanism. The fact it didn’t try and do anything suggested this was an electrical issue. Plenty of microswitches and relays involved in the roof, and my gut said something fairly trivial needed sorting to get it all working again.
Otherwise it was all small stuff. Only one key. Locking wheel nut key missing. Remote central locking not working. Boot struts failed. Leaking spark plug tubes. Lot’s of small fiddly things to sort out but nothing that was a huge deal.
I tend to buy cars like this based on my gut and despite the many, many little niggles, was confident that underneath everything this was a good car. Decided to do a deal. Seller knew that he had what was probably the cheapest Boxster in the UK at the time, so didn’t want to budge much on price, even with me pointing everything out. In the end he agreed to take £100 off to put towards the coolant tank (a job I already knew was a total pain in the arse) and we shook on £2400.
Got it home on the trailer a week or so later, and started cracking on, with the idea being to try and get it MOT ready over the course of a weekend. Up on stands, battery out and on charge (may as well try and see if I can save it) and start pulling the thing to bits.
Job number 1 was definitely changing the coolant tank and drying out the boot. Getting access to the tank isn’t too bad as I needed to strip all the carpets out of the boot anyway. They were all various degrees of soaked and it took a while to drain everything out. Thankfully, the nature of where the electrical bits and pieces are mounted in the boot means that nothing was water damaged.
Unfortunately, to complete the coolant take change, I needed access to the engine bay. Which requires you dropping the roof. Which I can’t do. Because it’s not working. Arse.
Porsche provide guidelines for how to manually activate the roof if it fails and you have the roof stuck down, but not if it’s stuck up. I didn’t have time to troubleshoot the roof switches/relays at this stage so it was time to get creative and find a way to operate the roof entirely manually for now.
There’s a few different arms and rods that connect all the different bits of the roof to the roof gearbox. Thankfully some of them are ball joints which can be popped off with enough force, but access was the real issue. It’s not designed to be disconnected this way round, from inside the car, and when the roof is closed and bits of the mechanism are under tension.
In the end it required me getting VERY athletic and essentially disconnecting the fabric roof and removing the rear clamshell from inside the car, through the roll bar, while threaded between various pieces of interior. I have no pictures of this, it took about 90 mins, it required three arms and could not, in any way, be described as graceful.
Boot lid removed, roof in service mode. Misery about to commence.
Behold, 200bhp of Stuttgart’s finest M96. Also pictured, life saving remote hose clamp pliers and good torch. Vital to complete a coolant tank change on a 986.
With the roof in ‘service mode’ and the engine cover removed I could then crack on. Changing the coolant tank is not fun on a 986. The tank itself also includes all the mouldings for the oil filler tube and the dipstick. You have about five hoses on each side of the boot/engine bay bulkhead, all joined together by a wacky two piece manifold. No idea why it was designed the way it was!
There’s plenty of write up’s online about the exact steps you need to run through, I won’t cover them here, but I’d been told that a set of remote hose clamp pliers were essential to the job and that is 100% correct. For some of the hoses on the engine bay side you are essentially doing it blind and there’s simply no way you could do it without them.
You can just about see how wet some of the noise/heat insulation is in this picture. The boot was seriously wet when I got it home.
The design of this coolant tank is bonkers. Not pictured: Bleeding knuckles and blue air.
The job itself probably took 2 hours. About 30 mins to remove the old one, and then 90 mins of swearing, bleeding knuckles and cursing the gods of Zuffenhausen for their stupidity in designing such a hateful bit of kit. It took SO LONG to be able to line up all the different hoses, blind, and at the same time. Misery.
Thankfully, once back in and with coolant on board, there didn’t appear to be any obvious leaks. Chucked the now charged, and seemingly healthy, battery back on the car and she fired right up. No leaks as it came up to temperature and job 1 complete. Result.
I now figured it was worth seeing if I could figure out what was wrong with the roof before I put it all back together. As you might imagine, there’s a lot of different switches and relays involved, but a very clever bloke on one of the US forums had pulled together a handy troubleshooting guide for the various stages in the process that help identify which component isn’t sending voltage to the right places. Out with the multimeter.
There’s a good video overview of the guide here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xntJKWZpFac
Much like the video, my problem seemed to be located in the roof latch switches. There’s a few different microswitches in there to tell the car to drop the windows, or send power to the roof relay etc.
Upon pulling mine out of the car it wasn’t immediately obvious what was wrong wrong with it, it looked in fairly good shape. Up close however you could see that a lot of the contacts were showing a tiny, tiny amount of corrosion and I wasn’t getting continuity across the right bits of the switches/pins/tracks.
Job jobbed and electricity flowing where it should be
Out with the soldering iron to reflow some of the 24 year old solder and I was now getting the multimeter beeping at the right time. Back in the car, roof latch connected up, handbrake on, hit the roof lower button and success! Could hear the motor whirring away. Easy, cheap and simple fix!
I then had a bit of fun reattaching all the roof arms and syncing the different sides of the roof together with the gearbox but, after a bit of faff, we had a fully functioning roof for the cost of around 2mm of solder. Result.
By this point I’d been through the car and was pretty confident it was going to pass an MOT. Had to sort out a leaking windscreen washer hose. No big deal. To save time/money in sorting out the 16 inch wheels the car came on I swapped my spare set of 996 wheels on (with a fairly insane 20mm spacer on the rear to clear the strut. The wheels and spacer won’t be staying on long term), changed a couple of bulbs and gave the thing a good wash. It came up surprisingly nicely.
Rear wheels looking pretty flush with the spacers. I do love the Sport Design wheels but I’m definitely going to put the 16’s back on soon.
Scrubs up well, right?!
It’s clearly had a little knock at the rear at some point, there’s a little dent in the exhaust trim and the bumper has a few dents/cracks in the lacquer. There’s some deep scratches in the front bumper from something too, maybe a parking scrape, but otherwise it was looking really rather presentable.
A few other fixes:
Locking wheel nut key no match for a decent 11/16ths socket. Took longer to remove the bolt from the socket than it did to remove the bolt from the wheel.
That will be why the central locking isn’t working then. Missing microswitch. New 50p microswitch and a cit of solder and we had remote central locking on the key again. Another cheap fix.
I was pretty stoked how it was coming together and last Saturday I chucked it in for it’s MOT which, I’m pleased to report, it passed with flying colours!
Success!
I used it most of last weekend and it’s shown up a few small things. The starter motor is definitely past its best. Making some horrible screeching noises when starting the car when hot, and occasionally being slow to crank. That will get swapped out soon.
It also needs a really good service. Noticed it doesn’t pull that well when revving it right out, almost feels like a slight misfire around 6k RPM. I’ve ordered plugs, oil filters and a new belt for it, it might need coil packs too but I want to look at the old ones first, and I’ll pull the throttle body and idle valve to give everything a bloody good clean up. I’ll also sort the spark plug tubes at the same time. I couldn’t improve upon the clutch feel with my bleeder, but it works for now. Something my Indy can look at when it goes into him at some point. Long story short - no major issues.
On the plus side, even with most of the components being 90k miles old it feels LOVELY to drive. It’s got a softness and fluidity on the road that is quite different to my 996. I’d imagine it feels even nicer on the original 16’s with a nice fat sidewall. Plenty of grip and reasonable body control, but with a bit of a magic carpet feeling as you stroke it along.
It’s not especially quick, but certainly doesn’t feel slow and it LOVES revs. Gearbox feels good, though it will probably get donated my old 996 shifter mechanism as this one feels tired, and the brakes feel surprisingly good despite their size.
It must be one of the most basic 2.5 Boxster’s ever made. Small wheels. Cloth seats. No AC. GT3 centre console delete as standard because someone didn’t want to spec the centre console cubby. With its original wheels on it’s got to be up there with the lightest 986 ever made, surely?
I know I got a particularly cheap one, but I also can’t help but feel like the 986 in general will never be this cheap again. I think it’s going to be one of those ‘can’t find one for less than £8k anymore’ cars over the next few years. They have struggled with the hairdressers car/996's poorer brother stigma for so long and I think it's entirely unjustified. These cars are brilliant.
Plan is to use it as a summer run around, do a few nice UK trips in it, let my girlfriend tool about in it and then see what we want to do with it. Keep it, sell it, mod it. Not sure. It owes me so little as it stands, about £2700 as of today, that it feels almost disposable (I realise how that sounds. It's all relative when you've spent as much as I have on an old 996!) and is nice not to have to worry about where to park it, speed bumps, kerbed wheels etc.
I always end up writing essays in readers cars so, as always, thanks for reading if you got this far. Shout with any comments or questions
I’ve got a bit of experience with the 986/996 platform, this is my second 986, and you can read about my 3.7 996 over here: https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&...
As my 996 has slowly become a bit more focused (and valuable), I fancied another Porsche to be able to tool about in without worrying too much about it. If it cost peanuts to buy and run, and had a 1000 mile sunroof, then that was a bonus. As I know the platform so well I also knew that I could look after another one of these cars without too much bother and, as a bonus, already had a bunch of spares knocking around.
Now, as everyone knows, to get a cheap convertible you should really buy in winter, so I started scouring the bargain basement of the automotive world, Facebook Marketplace, around Christmas time. I had a strict search criteria. The car had to be a 986. Had to be a 2.5 (I’d always heard good things about the engine/gearbox combo and the 2.5’s have all the right IMS bearings etc) and had to be cheap. I set my max budget at £3k and waited to see what sort of scabby old Porsche’s turned up.
Then, in early Jan, this hovered into view:
]Doesn’t look too bad, right? It was up for £2.5k on 90k miles and the pics gave me a bit of confidence it wasn’t a complete nail. On the bad side it had no MOT (though a fairly clean history…), and the last one expired in July 2021. It had zero service history, and the paint was described as ‘not perfect’ in the badly written ad. Sounds like a perfect candidate for a bargain.
Few messages exchanged with the seller, and a viewing was agreed. To the sellers credit I couldn’t see the car until the weekend but, because I was first, he agreed to hold it for me despite him saying his ‘phone was ringing off the hook’. Likely story….
When I turned up the car looked quite a bit different to the ad (always the way….) and it turned out the pics he used to show the car off were from when he bought it in March 2020. Not a good start. Since then the poor old girl had clearly lived a little bit of a hard life. The seller had bought it during the first lockdown, used it for a year to mess about in, bought a Cayman as a second toy, started using that instead, and the old Boxster got laid up. She was parked up covered in dust/dirt from the lock up, wheels were a bit tatty with knackered tyres, and there were plenty of small bumps and dings on the body/bumpers.
The battery was as flat as a pancake (adding to the parts list straight away…), but the car fired up from cold straight away with a booster pack, and settled to a nice smooth idle. No nasty noises, no puddles of oil underneath it. Even sounded pretty good burbling away with the standard exhaust.
Seller then casually mentioned it ‘seems to leak a bit of coolant from the expansion tank’ which in reality meant that the boot carpet was swimming with water. It had clearly been leaking for a while and he had been topping it up over and over. Might have been handy to mention that in the ad. Job and parts list growing.
Seller had also said that he had fitted a clutch and slave cylinder to it when he bought it and while it all worked, car went into any gear without any nasty noises, the clutch pedal felt AWFUL. Super light and very, very short travel. I know that bleeding these up can be a pain so assumed they hadn’t done a good enough job of bleeding the slave. Not a deal breaker.
The interior was fairly grotty and dirty, the cloth seats were rank and need a serious wet vac, but it was all in one piece. Unfortunately while poking around inside it became clear that the roof wasn’t working. Also not mentioned in the ad. “I swear it worked last time I used it’. Annoying.
Opening the roof latch would get the windows to drop as the should, but despite handbrake being on and car stopped, pressing the button on the dash resulted in absolutely nothing. On the plus side a load of nasty grinding would have suggested a broken mechanism. The fact it didn’t try and do anything suggested this was an electrical issue. Plenty of microswitches and relays involved in the roof, and my gut said something fairly trivial needed sorting to get it all working again.
Otherwise it was all small stuff. Only one key. Locking wheel nut key missing. Remote central locking not working. Boot struts failed. Leaking spark plug tubes. Lot’s of small fiddly things to sort out but nothing that was a huge deal.
I tend to buy cars like this based on my gut and despite the many, many little niggles, was confident that underneath everything this was a good car. Decided to do a deal. Seller knew that he had what was probably the cheapest Boxster in the UK at the time, so didn’t want to budge much on price, even with me pointing everything out. In the end he agreed to take £100 off to put towards the coolant tank (a job I already knew was a total pain in the arse) and we shook on £2400.
Got it home on the trailer a week or so later, and started cracking on, with the idea being to try and get it MOT ready over the course of a weekend. Up on stands, battery out and on charge (may as well try and see if I can save it) and start pulling the thing to bits.
Job number 1 was definitely changing the coolant tank and drying out the boot. Getting access to the tank isn’t too bad as I needed to strip all the carpets out of the boot anyway. They were all various degrees of soaked and it took a while to drain everything out. Thankfully, the nature of where the electrical bits and pieces are mounted in the boot means that nothing was water damaged.
Unfortunately, to complete the coolant take change, I needed access to the engine bay. Which requires you dropping the roof. Which I can’t do. Because it’s not working. Arse.
Porsche provide guidelines for how to manually activate the roof if it fails and you have the roof stuck down, but not if it’s stuck up. I didn’t have time to troubleshoot the roof switches/relays at this stage so it was time to get creative and find a way to operate the roof entirely manually for now.
There’s a few different arms and rods that connect all the different bits of the roof to the roof gearbox. Thankfully some of them are ball joints which can be popped off with enough force, but access was the real issue. It’s not designed to be disconnected this way round, from inside the car, and when the roof is closed and bits of the mechanism are under tension.
In the end it required me getting VERY athletic and essentially disconnecting the fabric roof and removing the rear clamshell from inside the car, through the roll bar, while threaded between various pieces of interior. I have no pictures of this, it took about 90 mins, it required three arms and could not, in any way, be described as graceful.
Boot lid removed, roof in service mode. Misery about to commence.
Behold, 200bhp of Stuttgart’s finest M96. Also pictured, life saving remote hose clamp pliers and good torch. Vital to complete a coolant tank change on a 986.
With the roof in ‘service mode’ and the engine cover removed I could then crack on. Changing the coolant tank is not fun on a 986. The tank itself also includes all the mouldings for the oil filler tube and the dipstick. You have about five hoses on each side of the boot/engine bay bulkhead, all joined together by a wacky two piece manifold. No idea why it was designed the way it was!
There’s plenty of write up’s online about the exact steps you need to run through, I won’t cover them here, but I’d been told that a set of remote hose clamp pliers were essential to the job and that is 100% correct. For some of the hoses on the engine bay side you are essentially doing it blind and there’s simply no way you could do it without them.
You can just about see how wet some of the noise/heat insulation is in this picture. The boot was seriously wet when I got it home.
The design of this coolant tank is bonkers. Not pictured: Bleeding knuckles and blue air.
The job itself probably took 2 hours. About 30 mins to remove the old one, and then 90 mins of swearing, bleeding knuckles and cursing the gods of Zuffenhausen for their stupidity in designing such a hateful bit of kit. It took SO LONG to be able to line up all the different hoses, blind, and at the same time. Misery.
Thankfully, once back in and with coolant on board, there didn’t appear to be any obvious leaks. Chucked the now charged, and seemingly healthy, battery back on the car and she fired right up. No leaks as it came up to temperature and job 1 complete. Result.
I now figured it was worth seeing if I could figure out what was wrong with the roof before I put it all back together. As you might imagine, there’s a lot of different switches and relays involved, but a very clever bloke on one of the US forums had pulled together a handy troubleshooting guide for the various stages in the process that help identify which component isn’t sending voltage to the right places. Out with the multimeter.
There’s a good video overview of the guide here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xntJKWZpFac
Much like the video, my problem seemed to be located in the roof latch switches. There’s a few different microswitches in there to tell the car to drop the windows, or send power to the roof relay etc.
Upon pulling mine out of the car it wasn’t immediately obvious what was wrong wrong with it, it looked in fairly good shape. Up close however you could see that a lot of the contacts were showing a tiny, tiny amount of corrosion and I wasn’t getting continuity across the right bits of the switches/pins/tracks.
Job jobbed and electricity flowing where it should be
Out with the soldering iron to reflow some of the 24 year old solder and I was now getting the multimeter beeping at the right time. Back in the car, roof latch connected up, handbrake on, hit the roof lower button and success! Could hear the motor whirring away. Easy, cheap and simple fix!
I then had a bit of fun reattaching all the roof arms and syncing the different sides of the roof together with the gearbox but, after a bit of faff, we had a fully functioning roof for the cost of around 2mm of solder. Result.
By this point I’d been through the car and was pretty confident it was going to pass an MOT. Had to sort out a leaking windscreen washer hose. No big deal. To save time/money in sorting out the 16 inch wheels the car came on I swapped my spare set of 996 wheels on (with a fairly insane 20mm spacer on the rear to clear the strut. The wheels and spacer won’t be staying on long term), changed a couple of bulbs and gave the thing a good wash. It came up surprisingly nicely.
Rear wheels looking pretty flush with the spacers. I do love the Sport Design wheels but I’m definitely going to put the 16’s back on soon.
Scrubs up well, right?!
It’s clearly had a little knock at the rear at some point, there’s a little dent in the exhaust trim and the bumper has a few dents/cracks in the lacquer. There’s some deep scratches in the front bumper from something too, maybe a parking scrape, but otherwise it was looking really rather presentable.
A few other fixes:
Locking wheel nut key no match for a decent 11/16ths socket. Took longer to remove the bolt from the socket than it did to remove the bolt from the wheel.
That will be why the central locking isn’t working then. Missing microswitch. New 50p microswitch and a cit of solder and we had remote central locking on the key again. Another cheap fix.
I was pretty stoked how it was coming together and last Saturday I chucked it in for it’s MOT which, I’m pleased to report, it passed with flying colours!
Success!
I used it most of last weekend and it’s shown up a few small things. The starter motor is definitely past its best. Making some horrible screeching noises when starting the car when hot, and occasionally being slow to crank. That will get swapped out soon.
It also needs a really good service. Noticed it doesn’t pull that well when revving it right out, almost feels like a slight misfire around 6k RPM. I’ve ordered plugs, oil filters and a new belt for it, it might need coil packs too but I want to look at the old ones first, and I’ll pull the throttle body and idle valve to give everything a bloody good clean up. I’ll also sort the spark plug tubes at the same time. I couldn’t improve upon the clutch feel with my bleeder, but it works for now. Something my Indy can look at when it goes into him at some point. Long story short - no major issues.
On the plus side, even with most of the components being 90k miles old it feels LOVELY to drive. It’s got a softness and fluidity on the road that is quite different to my 996. I’d imagine it feels even nicer on the original 16’s with a nice fat sidewall. Plenty of grip and reasonable body control, but with a bit of a magic carpet feeling as you stroke it along.
It’s not especially quick, but certainly doesn’t feel slow and it LOVES revs. Gearbox feels good, though it will probably get donated my old 996 shifter mechanism as this one feels tired, and the brakes feel surprisingly good despite their size.
It must be one of the most basic 2.5 Boxster’s ever made. Small wheels. Cloth seats. No AC. GT3 centre console delete as standard because someone didn’t want to spec the centre console cubby. With its original wheels on it’s got to be up there with the lightest 986 ever made, surely?
I know I got a particularly cheap one, but I also can’t help but feel like the 986 in general will never be this cheap again. I think it’s going to be one of those ‘can’t find one for less than £8k anymore’ cars over the next few years. They have struggled with the hairdressers car/996's poorer brother stigma for so long and I think it's entirely unjustified. These cars are brilliant.
Plan is to use it as a summer run around, do a few nice UK trips in it, let my girlfriend tool about in it and then see what we want to do with it. Keep it, sell it, mod it. Not sure. It owes me so little as it stands, about £2700 as of today, that it feels almost disposable (I realise how that sounds. It's all relative when you've spent as much as I have on an old 996!) and is nice not to have to worry about where to park it, speed bumps, kerbed wheels etc.
I always end up writing essays in readers cars so, as always, thanks for reading if you got this far. Shout with any comments or questions
Edited by Mallone on Thursday 23 February 23:02
Over from the "poverty Pork" thread. Great effort Mallone! The car is looking lovely.
I'm very jealous of your space and skills. I've wanted an early 2.5 for many years now (to go along with my 997). But living in a flat with no garage means that, even the small fixes you've done, would have cost me over £1k as they'd require specialists to sort.
Keep up the good work!
What's next for the car in terms of work?
Time flies when you’re having fun and the Boxster has been getting used LOADS over the past few months (I’ve somehow managed to do 5k in it so far…) so thought I’d update the thread on how it’s been getting on.
There’s been a few ‘cheap Boxster’ disaster stories in Readers Cars recently so I feel it’s my duty to try and demonstrate they don’t all s**t themselves when you buy at the bottom of the market!
In the last update I’d just managed to get it back up and running secure it’s MOT, but still had a fairly long to do list to work through to make sure it was fully sorted.
First thing to tackle was a big service…
Major Service
I had zero paperwork with the car when I collected it so knew I needed to give it a proper service before I could start using it in anger. I also had a slight misfire/reluctance to pull at high revs so wanted to make sure that I’d been through the ignition system to check that the plugs and coils were in good order.
In service mode with the boot lid removed for some better access to the engine bay. Mid engined problems!
[iNew aux belt going on. Old one was in fairly good shape. Idler bearings also not grumbling too much. [/I]
Lots of brittle plastic in here I needed to be careful with but the throttle body came off easily in the end for a thorough clean. Air filter replaced too.
Despite the best efforts of my CTEK, the battery that came with the car wasn’t holding any charge so, in keeping with the budget/banger nature of this car I thought I’d give one of Tanya’s budget ‘Enduroline’ batteries a go. Hard to argue with £80 delivered. Pleased to say it’s been rock solid since.
Can’t fault the service from Tanya, and the battery seems fine so far, but we’ll see how it copes with a cold British winter later in the year….
No pics of the plug change, It’s a bit miserable poking around under this car dodging brakes, exhaust and coolant lines, but they looked pretty tired when they came out. Well worth changing. Thankfully coils were all in good shape, no cracking or issues, and look to have been changed at some point in the cars life.
The oil that came out of the sump was fairly clean, but the condition of the oil filter was terrible. It had clearly been skipped over the course of a few changes. Hard to describe but the pleats in the filter body had semi collapsed and the old oil had started to block the filter. This would definitely have caused problems at some point so I was glad to have got the chance to change it.
Swapped out the very tired original shifter for a spare 996 one. Dramatically improved the shift quality. The 5 speed box is a bit of a peach overall, lovely to use. Geared nicely, even for motorway running. Also, the gear knob is much nicer than any you get in a 996.
I’d also been getting some hot start issues from the starter, quite an embarrassing screech when it had been sat for a while, so figured I’d change that out at the same time. Slightly awkward job so not too many pics, but you can see the shiny new one installed in the pic below.
New starter installed. One of the bolts requires you to undo it from the cabin with the worlds longest extension on a ratchet. Obviously when it cracked free my hand slipped and nicely smashed into the sheet metal bulkhead……
Nothing like that feeling of warm blood filling your work gloves. Arse.
A solid few hours work over a slightly rainy Saturday, but I’m pleased to say that the car fired up with much more vigour and all of my high rev misfire/hesitation had completely disappeared. The 2.5 will now happily swing round to the rev limiter without any drama (and the noise that the intake makes when you do it is excellent). Job jobbed.
Interior Overhaul
Next up was sorting a bunch of interior niggles. I was getting used to the aftermarket Pioneer stereo but it only seemed to be working through one of the four speakers in the car. A previous owner had added door card speakers and, although I don’t personally like the idea of just cutting big holes in the door cards to do it, appeared to have done a reasonably neat job of it.
You can learn a great deal about a previous owner based solely on the quality of their stereo wiring!
A bit of investigation suggested that the two door card speakers simply hadn’t been connected to the new head unit (and sounded excellent when I resolved that oversight) but the dash speakers were way past their best. The one that was working was blown and the other one simply didn’t work.
I’ve been down this route before in the 996 so I pulled the trigger on a set of Alpine SPG-10C2’s for the dash, along with an excellent adapter kit from a new seller on eBay. I’ve used the JMG kit for this before, but they are a touch pricey for what they are. I was pleasantly surprised when the beautifully packaged kit arrived below:
A really, really nicely made kit and so well packaged. Link here if anyone else needs one - (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/314607360703?hash=item49400f5abf:g:WMoAAOSwYdRh-TV6)
New Alpine’s installed in the original speaker grilles. A very OEM+ install.
Installed in the car, along with some fiddling with the head unit to get the balance between the dash and door speakers sorted, and the stereo sounds really, really good - even with the roof down. Bonus.
Next up was door cards. The carpets in the doors were getting pretty damp when it rained heavily, and along with the non OEM speaker install made me think that there was likely some bodgery to sort inside the doors. I wasn’t wrong!
The drivers door card had a few tears in the membrane, mostly from the slightly ropey speaker wiring install, but nothing that I couldn’t fix with some tactically applied duct tape…. The passenger door was a different story as the weather membrane was missing completely!
Sigh. Frustrating that someone removed the membrane entirely but it also looks like this door isn’t original. The red hints at a small shunt at some point that’s meant a second hand door was required.
Again, with budget in mind, I didn’t really fancy dropping £80+ on some proper Porsche membranes so decided to make my own. Some plastic sheet, some double sided butyl tape and a LOT of patience later and I had my own door card membrane. No pics as I needed approximately three hands to put it all together but pleased to say both doors have been waterproof since.
Finally, with all the major interior fixes done I want to turn my hand to giving the interior a proper clean. The original ‘grey’ cloth seats were particularly nasty, with years of grot in them. Got them out of the car, cracked out the trusty wet vac, some upholstery cleaner, and a bit of elbow grease and discovered that……the seats weren’t even grey to begin with. I was nearly sick with the smells and fluids that were being sucked out of the fabric. I’d been happily sitting in these and driving around for weeks! The difference was, as you can see below, night and day. From grotty grey to a nice dark blue.
Your eyes are not deceiving you. These are both the same set of seats. So disgusting!
Colour of the wet vac water. Yummy.
As you might expect, the difference in smell and comfort has been pretty dramatic. God knows how many years of sweat, and dead skin and who knows what other fluids were soaked into those poor seats!
(More) Roof Repairs
I’d already sorted the roof mechanism/microswitches when I was first recommissioning the car, and it had been working perfectly (particularly using the speed sensor bypass that lets you use the roof on the move) but the more I was using the roof the more it became clear that whoever had previously sewn a new plastic rear window into the hood had done a pretty shoddy job.
Water would run straight through the stitching on the lower edge when it rained and was slowly soaking the rear carpets every time. They had also cut the plastic so tight to the edge of the window aperture that every time it folded down it was slowly tearing the plastic screen across its width. I’d carefully applied a bit of silicon to the edges to try and at least make them mostly watertight but the window was clearly on borrowed time overall. Not ideal.
The rest of the roof itself was in fairly good condition, no tears in the fabric or damage elsewhere, so I was keen to just trying get a new plastic window properly sewn in. I did some reading around and it was recommended I speak to Gary at Hubbard Upholstery up in Loughborough. I had a call with Gary to chat through some options and headed up the other week to get it sorted.
Cheaper rear window replacements (like the one that been done previously) simply add a new window layer over the old one before that is cut out. This leaves a weird double layer of plastic around the edge and often isn’t watertight.
You can see the original faded screen tied in top of the newer one. Neither fit for purpose in this case.
Gary was very keen to stress that he uses a different technique that is the same as that used in the factory when these were new. Involves completely unstitching the old window, cutting the new one to size, installing a double sided weather seal and then stitching the new window in. It includes the original strain relief ‘flaps’ withe side of the window fold so that there isn’t too much stress on the plastic. Gary was kind enough to let me hang around and watch him work and the craftsmanship was excellent. Highly recommended.
Only took about twenty minutes to strip the roof entirely. Easy when you know how!
Gary hard at work. Always a fan of watching people who REALLY know what they are doing. Craftsmanship.
The new window has made quite a difference to the sound level in the car and has proven itself to be completely watertight. Result. Can’t fault the service for £300 fitted.
Holiday Prep
We’ve decided to do bit of a driving tour for our summer trip this year, taking the ferry over to Santander and spending a few weeks driving up through the Pyrenees and France. A convertible without air conditioning might not be the best choice but ‘Babs’ (as my girlfriend has taken to calling the Boxster) has been selected as the vehicle of choice as oppose to the 996.
Smoking around the Shires in a bargain Boxster in the UK is one thing, but if we were going to be hooning around mountain passes in the summer heat I wanted to do a bit more to ensure the reliability of the old girl.
For me this meant new brakes all round, the discs were very close to being an advisory on the MOT, and, given I had no history of it being changed, I figured it would be pretty silly not to change the water pump and thermostat.
The brakes on the 2.5 are the smallest in the 986/996 world which thankfully means discs and pads are pretty cheap. Managed to pick up a set of Meyle discs and texture pads for around £180, with a Meyle water pump (with a composite impeller blade) and Wahler low temp thermostat coming to another £150. Not bad.
I have had a bad history with 986/996 brakes, with a number of cars having given me issues with caliper bolt threads stripping in the past. Surprisingly, the 2.5 gave me zero issues, with all four corners changed in around 2.5 hours. No pics as it’s just brakes, but other than having to tweak a dust shield that I must have bent when installing them they have been spot on straight away. Pedal feel is excellent and stopping power, despite the relatively small size of the disc has been great. Still a bit more bedding in to do, only managed around 50 miles so far, but once sorted should help us stop on those mountain passes!
New brakes on and looking shiny. Bit more bedding in to do yet.
Water pump a bit more involved, but access not too bad from under the car and through the ‘service hatch’. Water pump had been changed previously and, although it was slightly grotty in appearance, the bearing felt ok.
Nothing quite like feeling coolant running down you arm and getting dirt in your eyes doing a water pump on a 986/996! Access not that bad really. The components on the Boxster seem to take less of a beating vs the 911. Better protected.
Old water pump looking a bit grim, but bearing in good shape.
Block side looking pretty clean. Good access to clean up the mating surfaces from inside the cabin.
Shiny new bits ready to go.
All done.
These things can be a bit of a pain to bleed, but my technique always seems to work fairly well. Make sure the rear of the car is the highest point (on a hill or axle stands). Fill expansion tank to the top. Open bleed valve on the coolant tank. Run the car until the fans kick in a few times. Turn off. Let it cool down completely. Top off tank. Keep an eye on coolant level as you use it over the next few days. Job done.
Phew. That brings everything up to date as of last weekend. A few other small things to do before we set off at the end of July - the clutch still needs a good bleed and I really need to get another key before I lose this one - but otherwise the car is pretty sorted.
Looking forward to seeing how she copes in Spain and France! Thanks as always for reading
There’s been a few ‘cheap Boxster’ disaster stories in Readers Cars recently so I feel it’s my duty to try and demonstrate they don’t all s**t themselves when you buy at the bottom of the market!
In the last update I’d just managed to get it back up and running secure it’s MOT, but still had a fairly long to do list to work through to make sure it was fully sorted.
First thing to tackle was a big service…
Major Service
I had zero paperwork with the car when I collected it so knew I needed to give it a proper service before I could start using it in anger. I also had a slight misfire/reluctance to pull at high revs so wanted to make sure that I’d been through the ignition system to check that the plugs and coils were in good order.
In service mode with the boot lid removed for some better access to the engine bay. Mid engined problems!
[iNew aux belt going on. Old one was in fairly good shape. Idler bearings also not grumbling too much. [/I]
Lots of brittle plastic in here I needed to be careful with but the throttle body came off easily in the end for a thorough clean. Air filter replaced too.
Despite the best efforts of my CTEK, the battery that came with the car wasn’t holding any charge so, in keeping with the budget/banger nature of this car I thought I’d give one of Tanya’s budget ‘Enduroline’ batteries a go. Hard to argue with £80 delivered. Pleased to say it’s been rock solid since.
Can’t fault the service from Tanya, and the battery seems fine so far, but we’ll see how it copes with a cold British winter later in the year….
No pics of the plug change, It’s a bit miserable poking around under this car dodging brakes, exhaust and coolant lines, but they looked pretty tired when they came out. Well worth changing. Thankfully coils were all in good shape, no cracking or issues, and look to have been changed at some point in the cars life.
The oil that came out of the sump was fairly clean, but the condition of the oil filter was terrible. It had clearly been skipped over the course of a few changes. Hard to describe but the pleats in the filter body had semi collapsed and the old oil had started to block the filter. This would definitely have caused problems at some point so I was glad to have got the chance to change it.
Swapped out the very tired original shifter for a spare 996 one. Dramatically improved the shift quality. The 5 speed box is a bit of a peach overall, lovely to use. Geared nicely, even for motorway running. Also, the gear knob is much nicer than any you get in a 996.
I’d also been getting some hot start issues from the starter, quite an embarrassing screech when it had been sat for a while, so figured I’d change that out at the same time. Slightly awkward job so not too many pics, but you can see the shiny new one installed in the pic below.
New starter installed. One of the bolts requires you to undo it from the cabin with the worlds longest extension on a ratchet. Obviously when it cracked free my hand slipped and nicely smashed into the sheet metal bulkhead……
Nothing like that feeling of warm blood filling your work gloves. Arse.
A solid few hours work over a slightly rainy Saturday, but I’m pleased to say that the car fired up with much more vigour and all of my high rev misfire/hesitation had completely disappeared. The 2.5 will now happily swing round to the rev limiter without any drama (and the noise that the intake makes when you do it is excellent). Job jobbed.
Interior Overhaul
Next up was sorting a bunch of interior niggles. I was getting used to the aftermarket Pioneer stereo but it only seemed to be working through one of the four speakers in the car. A previous owner had added door card speakers and, although I don’t personally like the idea of just cutting big holes in the door cards to do it, appeared to have done a reasonably neat job of it.
You can learn a great deal about a previous owner based solely on the quality of their stereo wiring!
A bit of investigation suggested that the two door card speakers simply hadn’t been connected to the new head unit (and sounded excellent when I resolved that oversight) but the dash speakers were way past their best. The one that was working was blown and the other one simply didn’t work.
I’ve been down this route before in the 996 so I pulled the trigger on a set of Alpine SPG-10C2’s for the dash, along with an excellent adapter kit from a new seller on eBay. I’ve used the JMG kit for this before, but they are a touch pricey for what they are. I was pleasantly surprised when the beautifully packaged kit arrived below:
A really, really nicely made kit and so well packaged. Link here if anyone else needs one - (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/314607360703?hash=item49400f5abf:g:WMoAAOSwYdRh-TV6)
New Alpine’s installed in the original speaker grilles. A very OEM+ install.
Installed in the car, along with some fiddling with the head unit to get the balance between the dash and door speakers sorted, and the stereo sounds really, really good - even with the roof down. Bonus.
Next up was door cards. The carpets in the doors were getting pretty damp when it rained heavily, and along with the non OEM speaker install made me think that there was likely some bodgery to sort inside the doors. I wasn’t wrong!
The drivers door card had a few tears in the membrane, mostly from the slightly ropey speaker wiring install, but nothing that I couldn’t fix with some tactically applied duct tape…. The passenger door was a different story as the weather membrane was missing completely!
Sigh. Frustrating that someone removed the membrane entirely but it also looks like this door isn’t original. The red hints at a small shunt at some point that’s meant a second hand door was required.
Again, with budget in mind, I didn’t really fancy dropping £80+ on some proper Porsche membranes so decided to make my own. Some plastic sheet, some double sided butyl tape and a LOT of patience later and I had my own door card membrane. No pics as I needed approximately three hands to put it all together but pleased to say both doors have been waterproof since.
Finally, with all the major interior fixes done I want to turn my hand to giving the interior a proper clean. The original ‘grey’ cloth seats were particularly nasty, with years of grot in them. Got them out of the car, cracked out the trusty wet vac, some upholstery cleaner, and a bit of elbow grease and discovered that……the seats weren’t even grey to begin with. I was nearly sick with the smells and fluids that were being sucked out of the fabric. I’d been happily sitting in these and driving around for weeks! The difference was, as you can see below, night and day. From grotty grey to a nice dark blue.
Your eyes are not deceiving you. These are both the same set of seats. So disgusting!
Colour of the wet vac water. Yummy.
As you might expect, the difference in smell and comfort has been pretty dramatic. God knows how many years of sweat, and dead skin and who knows what other fluids were soaked into those poor seats!
(More) Roof Repairs
I’d already sorted the roof mechanism/microswitches when I was first recommissioning the car, and it had been working perfectly (particularly using the speed sensor bypass that lets you use the roof on the move) but the more I was using the roof the more it became clear that whoever had previously sewn a new plastic rear window into the hood had done a pretty shoddy job.
Water would run straight through the stitching on the lower edge when it rained and was slowly soaking the rear carpets every time. They had also cut the plastic so tight to the edge of the window aperture that every time it folded down it was slowly tearing the plastic screen across its width. I’d carefully applied a bit of silicon to the edges to try and at least make them mostly watertight but the window was clearly on borrowed time overall. Not ideal.
The rest of the roof itself was in fairly good condition, no tears in the fabric or damage elsewhere, so I was keen to just trying get a new plastic window properly sewn in. I did some reading around and it was recommended I speak to Gary at Hubbard Upholstery up in Loughborough. I had a call with Gary to chat through some options and headed up the other week to get it sorted.
Cheaper rear window replacements (like the one that been done previously) simply add a new window layer over the old one before that is cut out. This leaves a weird double layer of plastic around the edge and often isn’t watertight.
You can see the original faded screen tied in top of the newer one. Neither fit for purpose in this case.
Gary was very keen to stress that he uses a different technique that is the same as that used in the factory when these were new. Involves completely unstitching the old window, cutting the new one to size, installing a double sided weather seal and then stitching the new window in. It includes the original strain relief ‘flaps’ withe side of the window fold so that there isn’t too much stress on the plastic. Gary was kind enough to let me hang around and watch him work and the craftsmanship was excellent. Highly recommended.
Only took about twenty minutes to strip the roof entirely. Easy when you know how!
Gary hard at work. Always a fan of watching people who REALLY know what they are doing. Craftsmanship.
The new window has made quite a difference to the sound level in the car and has proven itself to be completely watertight. Result. Can’t fault the service for £300 fitted.
Holiday Prep
We’ve decided to do bit of a driving tour for our summer trip this year, taking the ferry over to Santander and spending a few weeks driving up through the Pyrenees and France. A convertible without air conditioning might not be the best choice but ‘Babs’ (as my girlfriend has taken to calling the Boxster) has been selected as the vehicle of choice as oppose to the 996.
Smoking around the Shires in a bargain Boxster in the UK is one thing, but if we were going to be hooning around mountain passes in the summer heat I wanted to do a bit more to ensure the reliability of the old girl.
For me this meant new brakes all round, the discs were very close to being an advisory on the MOT, and, given I had no history of it being changed, I figured it would be pretty silly not to change the water pump and thermostat.
The brakes on the 2.5 are the smallest in the 986/996 world which thankfully means discs and pads are pretty cheap. Managed to pick up a set of Meyle discs and texture pads for around £180, with a Meyle water pump (with a composite impeller blade) and Wahler low temp thermostat coming to another £150. Not bad.
I have had a bad history with 986/996 brakes, with a number of cars having given me issues with caliper bolt threads stripping in the past. Surprisingly, the 2.5 gave me zero issues, with all four corners changed in around 2.5 hours. No pics as it’s just brakes, but other than having to tweak a dust shield that I must have bent when installing them they have been spot on straight away. Pedal feel is excellent and stopping power, despite the relatively small size of the disc has been great. Still a bit more bedding in to do, only managed around 50 miles so far, but once sorted should help us stop on those mountain passes!
New brakes on and looking shiny. Bit more bedding in to do yet.
Water pump a bit more involved, but access not too bad from under the car and through the ‘service hatch’. Water pump had been changed previously and, although it was slightly grotty in appearance, the bearing felt ok.
Nothing quite like feeling coolant running down you arm and getting dirt in your eyes doing a water pump on a 986/996! Access not that bad really. The components on the Boxster seem to take less of a beating vs the 911. Better protected.
Old water pump looking a bit grim, but bearing in good shape.
Block side looking pretty clean. Good access to clean up the mating surfaces from inside the cabin.
Shiny new bits ready to go.
All done.
These things can be a bit of a pain to bleed, but my technique always seems to work fairly well. Make sure the rear of the car is the highest point (on a hill or axle stands). Fill expansion tank to the top. Open bleed valve on the coolant tank. Run the car until the fans kick in a few times. Turn off. Let it cool down completely. Top off tank. Keep an eye on coolant level as you use it over the next few days. Job done.
Phew. That brings everything up to date as of last weekend. A few other small things to do before we set off at the end of July - the clutch still needs a good bleed and I really need to get another key before I lose this one - but otherwise the car is pretty sorted.
Looking forward to seeing how she copes in Spain and France! Thanks as always for reading
Edited by Mallone on Tuesday 27th June 21:14
Nice work!
was a great, reliale car that was easy to DIY maintain.
Ref Battery - it may be useful for other owners to know that there are mutliple sizes of batteries that can be used in 986/996, and the biggest one is quite a lot bigger than the one that comes as standard (like you have fitted). There are addtional munting holes to move the sering brackets out to suit the larger unit.
Useful if the car is a daily driver and you need to trust it!
Ref pulleys - sounds like yours are in good nick, but whilst replacement idler pulleys are available, its easy to just press in a new cartridge bearing, which are a couple of quid max. Makes for a lovely smooth quiet running engine.
Car looks great, wil be superb for some Euro Touring!
Mallone said:
There’s been a few ‘cheap Boxster’ disaster stories in Readers Cars recently so I feel it’s my duty to try and demonstrate they don’t all s**t themselves when you buy at the bottom of the market!
Said this before but mine, featured in readers cars here, https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&...was a great, reliale car that was easy to DIY maintain.
Ref Battery - it may be useful for other owners to know that there are mutliple sizes of batteries that can be used in 986/996, and the biggest one is quite a lot bigger than the one that comes as standard (like you have fitted). There are addtional munting holes to move the sering brackets out to suit the larger unit.
Useful if the car is a daily driver and you need to trust it!
Ref pulleys - sounds like yours are in good nick, but whilst replacement idler pulleys are available, its easy to just press in a new cartridge bearing, which are a couple of quid max. Makes for a lovely smooth quiet running engine.
Car looks great, wil be superb for some Euro Touring!
Nice to see you getting stuck in with the DIY. If you can do the work yourself these cars become very appealing for the price vs fun you'll have, I don't think anything else offers the value for money that these do.
If the water pump is anything like in my 997 (looks to be the same item) then people recommend to treat them as a service item and change them every few years as they are known for failing
If the water pump is anything like in my 997 (looks to be the same item) then people recommend to treat them as a service item and change them every few years as they are known for failing
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