Living with a Porsche 944

With MOT, insurance certificate and Road Tax reminder in hand I headed off to the Post Office - purveyors of all things postal and the holy grail of road tax. Permission to drive on Her Majesty's roads without threat of arrest or crushed 944. It should be such a simple affair: hand over the documents and a cheque, and get handed that colourful round little disc to put in your car window. But no, am I the only person who thinks that I shouldn't have to lose a month of road tax because it's more than 2 days before the end of the month? I couldn't buy road tax from the beginning of December, I had to buy it as if from the beginning of November. That means I pay for 6 months tax and only get five; or pay for a year and only get 11 months - especially when the road fund is raided for other government spending. I think we're taxed enough not to want to pay for a months road tax and not get it! So as a matter of principal I'm parking the 944 in the garage and waiting a

Excellent news - my 944 passed MOT today. It felt so satisfying. After all the work that's gone into car over the couple months; the delays and the bruised knuckles and the desire to throttle an old Porsche engineer every now and again. Now to get it taxed so I can roam the B roads!

I researched this process on Clarks Garage (where they call it a Control Arm) and in the Porsche workshop manual, it didn't seem like it was going to be much of a problem. I marked the castor mounts position which everybody was saying was the most important thing to do because the suspension geometry might be effected - and that was pretty easy, no problems there. I don't know what all the fuss is about that really. Removing and replacing was straight forward. The only difficulty I encountered was separating the ball joint from the spindle; and the anti-roll bar from the wishbone. I resorted to borrowing a crowbar from a friend and I wished I'd done that sooner. Well now I know. In fact if I do this again I'm going to remove the ARB completely first and then replace all the bushings too, but first let's get the 944 though MOT and on the road again.

After waiting a month my front replacement wishbone has arrived. I missed the free MOT retest due to the seller's failure to ship my part. I was told a couple of times it had been sent - why can't people just be honest? I finally lost patience and raised a dispute with PayPal to recover my money. I had resigned myself to buying one of the refurbished units from Hartech, but lo and behold what lands on my doorstep this morning - the wishbones I paid for more than a month ago. I should have just driven to Kent to pick these up myself! Tomorrow I'm going to tackle the wishbone replacement and book the 944 in for another MOT.