Living with a Porsche 944

It's been an interesting few days with the 944. New sounds, or should I say noises; new insights; and new challenges are plentiful. With the family mile muncher off the road the Porsche has been in daily duties of late acting as a family car. Which is less than ideal with no rear seat belts. My younger children find it quite comfortable back there actually. Friday past I headed down to Rye to meet a friend & client at Sumo Power. One of the top tuning workshops in the UK. Sumo Power also field a pair of Nissan GTRs in the FIA GT1 world championship and race prep a selection of Rally & Drifting cars too. The race cars are a sight to behold and the facilities quite exceptional. A great place then to hold a rolling road session on a project car. Besides the race car SP had a veritable smorgasbord of retro and performance cars to drool over. Such as a twin turbo'd Lamborghini with dry-ice cooled charge cooler: A convertible Aston Martin: A lovely Dod...

With such incredible weather this weekend it was great to stretch the legs of my 944 with two 90 mile journeys. In between the trips I topped up the Castrol oil for the first time since the big oil service last year. The engine took two litres of the good stuff. So that was well timed too.

That's right today 25 years ago a very fortunate gentleman picked up my lovely 944 from AFN in London. I still have the original order and invoice in my history file too.

A dry day in the middle of winter can only mean one thing. A last blast in the 944. Here's to 2011.

I like simple cost effective solutions to common problems. Such as the sunroof leak common to these old Porsches. I had my sunroof drains cleared last year when I bought the 944 and for the most part only experienced water ingress through the sunroof in very heavy showers - just like the ones we had the past week. As my '44 leads a privileged life in a warm, cozy garage this is not something I worry to much about. As a precaution I had begun to investigate replacement sunroof seals, and if you've ever done that you may agree that the Porsche items are over-priced IMO so I was looking into alternatives, particularly from VW. I compared a number of different profiles to that on my 944 and concluded that while the inner seal was easy to obtain for very little money per meter, the profile of the outer seal had no alternative that I could easily source. While I prodded around the sunroof opening I began to wonder just how the water was making it's way in, over the lip and ...

When your 944 is going on 25 the MOT feels a little like a lottery. However I'm really pleased that "The Hoff", as my 944 has become to be known as, passed without one advisory! My friendly tester proved once again that having the test done at a garage known personally by you has it's benefits: he noticed that the front drivers side spring had become poorly seated on the strut and promptly corrected it FOC. Had he not it would have been a fail for sure. My '44 is going wonderfully and I'm enjoying it immensely.

In my quest to tighten up the handling on the 944, I bought a new Needle Bearing from Porsche in an attempt to eliminate the fore-aft play in the steering at the top universal joint. The part number for the replacement is 477.419.059 and costs £88.86 posted from an OPC. Nothing like the effort required to actually remove the old one... I began the process by reading section 48 of Porsche Workshop manual. It appeared a simple enough process but two things bothered me: firstly, it required a chisel to remove a shear bolt (which in my limited experience never "shear"; and secondly a drill to remove two screws from the ignition lock. I was bothered because a quick look under the dashboard made it quite obvious that whoever had written the manual hadn't performed this task - well not without a dashboard in place that's for sure. I was bothered before I'd even started. Furthermore, the manual doesn't detail the replacement of this bearing at all - just the rem...