Porsche £500 bangernomics

Merely laughing because your already doing what most would think of as a full and proper job.

Also thought of this recently – theres a tidy looking and reasonably priced early 3.2 manual on Autotrader. Small wheels, steel coil suspension, manual, venerable VR6 engine… prime budget cayenne-ing fodder.

Just found it – very nice, it’s not often you see them with 17″ wheels.

@neilnevill

Sorry-just noticed an emoji became a ?

The work I’m doing so far is just to get it back to a mechanical level I’m happy with and to stop the any rust from progressing further. Once the Volvo is done then I’ll bring the Cayenne inside and do it properly – remove the rear subframe for shot blasting, rebush everything etc.

Some good friends have a printing company and have done wraps previously, I think the Rothmans Cayennes look awesome so I might go that route.

Just caught up with this thread – Porky’s looking fantastic, and absolutely in its element! Exactly what Porsche designed it for; for £500, and in the hands of someone with an engineering passion, and the space, what a wonderful project.

sharkbaitFree Member
Cool!

Shame about the cruise…. That would have been handy.

What will you do about the rear subframe (seeing as you’re not scared of taking cars apart!)?

Small update.

Cruise control

Porsche want ~£500 for the cruise control retro fit kit which consists of the stalk, short length of cable and two pins for the cable to connect into the steering wheel module and main loom. You can’t buy the stalk on its own, but the pins are available separately for less than £2.

Ive bought a complete steering wheel module from an Audi Q7 (functionally the same as a Cayenne) for £15 off eBay. I’ll remove the stalk and fit it to my module.

Subframe.

Made myself comfy with a bit of foam seeing as I’m going to be under here for quite a few hours! Ground/scraped/chiseled the rust off, treated with Bilt Hamber, let that cure then brushed Bilt Hamber Dynax over the top. I’m going to source a spare subframe, have it shot blasted and do it properly like I’ve done with my XC90 subframe but this will do for this winter’s protection.

Popped the front sill covers off and surprisingly both sides were really good condition, there are some horror stories online of major rot in this area. Hosed a lot of compacted dirt out then popped the covers back on.

And finally – ferry booked yesterday for Christmas road trip…..

Oh, to have the necessary knowledge, skills and space to be able to do something like this! My ideal car.

necessary knowledge

When you run older cars everyone has already had the same problems and they are widely documented on forums etc.

skills

No particular skills needed for this particular job, just patience and determination (it’s a bloody awful job that I hate doing). The factory Porsche workshop manual and parts ID is available FOC online for any major tinkering. I haven’t had to make any specific tooling yet and have used normal hand tools.

Space

All the jobs on this Porsche have been done outside. It requires a bit of planning and luck with the weather – ie get the car prepped for winter when the weather is nice.

Time

Is the thing I have plenty of which is probably the main difference.

@countzero – keep an eye on autotrader, there are the occasional unmolested genuine cars that values have been dragged down by the blinged up gangsta wanna be pimped Cayennes. Theres a silver 955 in London with the very rare tailgate spare wheel carrier – it might even have the ultra rare locking rear differential. A V6 on coils is pretty easy to maintain, avoid the V8’s and diesels if running on a shoestring and stick to pre 2006 for lower road fund.

Great thread!

With that attention to detail you should just be “NissanPrairie” 🙂

@timba

I’ve come on a bit since the mighty Prairie days. We had so many awesome bike and snowboarding roadtrips in that absolute shed of a car before it eventually died of rust 🙁

I can see that now 🙂

And finally – ferry booked yesterday for Christmas road trip…..

But before that we’ve been down to see friends in St David’s Pembrokeshire (550mile round trip).

I know I keep harping on about how good this car is, and nowadays it’s probably completely outclassed…..but the motorway weather conditions going were atrocious and it handled the torrential rain absolutely surefootedly. We came back today on the twisty route through the middle of Wales in glorious sunshine and the car wore a different hat as it effortlessly cruised home.

However! Big expenditure is looming………

It’s been flagging a few transfer box faults now for the last couple of journeys. The transfer box is the ‘2nd gearbox’ bolted onto the back of the ‘normal’ gearbox that then splits the output drive to the front and rear axles. It also contains a lower ratio ‘set of gears’ for low speed off roading.

It’s a big chunk of metal that newer Cayennes don’t have.

Bolted to the transfer box is an actuator motor, this operates the high/low range selection. Mine is throwing a fault code as 1st gen Cayennes overworked this actuator causing it to overheat and damage the feedback potentiometer.

New ones are £1200……….

Also of concern is the rear propshaft, this is a well known problem for 955’s and Touraregs. The centre support bearing has a thin rubber outer supporting ring that wears fairly quickly. The propshaft then flails around. Mine has been replaced by the previous owner (at a garage) but they bodged the main CV joint cover. As a result it’s spun it’s grease out and is becoming noisy.

New genuine Porsche propshafts are £2000…….(I don’t fit Chinese/eBay/aftermarket junk in any of my cars)

It’s also throwing the odd evap valve fault but these are only £35.

Bit of decision making and some tinkering required before it’s next big trip out at Christmas. Maybe running a £500 Cayenne isn’t so cheap after all, let’s see what I come up with……

It’s a big chunk of metal that newer Cayennes don’t have.

Although the newer Cayennes don’t have the low range box they still have transfer box and they still go wrong!

Mine was replaced under warranty.

Not entirely unrelated, has anyone been watching these guys turn their Cayenne into a pick up?

Bolted to the transfer box is an actuator motor, this operates the high/low range selection. Mine is throwing a fault code as 1st gen Cayennes overworked this actuator causing it to overheat and damage the feedback potentiometer.

New ones are £1200……….

Can you get a cheaper VW version, Touareg, etc? Does someone rebuild them in a shed somewhere?

Fingers crossed 🙂

Yes that’s what I was about to suggest,  the shed-man indy doing refurbishment and upgrades, probably on a swap basis and hopefully half the price of new.  Get one from a scrapper to send in if you need to keep the car (?   ‘Car’ seems very inappropriate!) on the road in the meantime.

Hope you find a solution!

How complex is the props aft?

Here in Oz you can get them made. I sat and watched someone make one for me years ago. He even put higher spec joints in “just in case”.

@reeksy

It’s usually the support bearing that fails – mine has been replaced previously but the garage bodged the centre CV joint cover in the process.

There are lots of options ranging in cost from £150 new Chinese eBay units through to £600 OEM (GKN) and then upwards to new genuine.

My thinking at this moment in time is to source a used propshaft from my local Porsche breakers then fit a JXB support bearing upgrade. This mod replaces the outer rubber support ring (you cut it off the bearing) and doesn’t require the driveshaft to be split.

https://www.jxbperformance.com/products/p/cayenne-touareg-driveshaft-center-support-bearing-carrier-upgrade

Small update.

So we left the thread with a knackered propshaft and a transfer box actuator code……

I’d been keeping an eye on eBay for awhile for used propshafts just to see what came up.
I noticed a good condition used shaft with a ‘white sticker’ in one of the photos. Zooming in showed it was a recent date GKN (OEM), the listing was for a 3.2 so it hadn’t seen Turbo power in its time. I haggled it for £120 delivered.

On delivery it looked like new and the centre bearing support was good. I popped the CV end cover off and repacked it with moly grease then gave the shaft a few layer’s of Rustoleum.

The following weekend I dropped the original shaft and mounting plate out. This is why I don’t use garages – this centre bearing had been replaced previously (probably with a cheap and nasty unbranded crap), it was dry and knackered. The centre CV cover was bodged and had spun it’s grease out. Both CV’s are dead and the shaft is headed for the scrap bin.

Mounting plate cleaned up and painted, shaft installed and ‘aligned’ by rack of eye and twist of gob.

Transfer box actuator – I removed this at the same time as the propshaft. I pulled it apart as I’d read of some being ‘burnt out’ on disassembly. Fairly simple – DC perm mag motor with multi stage epicyclic reduction box to operate the transfer case and a quadrature channel encoder for feedback of position.

Checked it’s operation and everything looked okay so I cleaned, greased, painted as required then reinstalled. Fault code needs further investigation.

Whilst the rear end was raised I pulled the wheels off and cleaned/Dinitrol’d the hubs, brake splash guards etc.

Spark plugs. I hate doing these, it’s a simple job but the consequences are huge should something go wrong.
Porsche include a nifty little tool for pulling the coil cable connectors then an eBay tool pulled the coils out of the head. They all looked original and fairly clean.
Hoovered everything before removing the spark plugs.
They all came out okay and looked fine although I don’t know how long they’ve been in.
Nervously screwed the new NGK’s in by hand then tightened with my Facom torque wrench.

Test drove and everything’s fine, the replacement propshaft has removed the low speed bearing whine and feels more direct / less clunky.

MOT next!………..

I love this thread. FWIW, the P0441 code can be thrown by worse than normal fuel – my GTI throws it every time I fill up in NL after a tank or two in Germany. We used to get transfer box fault codes thrown up on our old L322 as well, which ended up being the potentiometer’s track wearing away and the car throwing a fit because all of a sudden it didn’t know where it was. Switching between high, low, and back to high again at the next opportunity always cleared it.

I should have mentioned – the torque wrench pictured above cost more than the car!!!!! (Borrowed from work)

@misteralz

Re. the transfer box code that this is throwing – the 4wd system on these Cayenne’s is really complex and the cars are very capable (they benchmarked against Ranger Rover’s). The actuator changes the high/low ratio selection but also constantly shifts torque front to rear as needed via a set of clutch plates and can lock the clutch pack to emulate a locking centre differential. Early 955’s had an over active control module, this resulted in the motors burning out hence why I disassembled mine. Later modules and actuators can be retrofitted but they are fairly rare and you have to search eBay for serial numbers.

Frustratingly the same fault can be thrown due to low battery voltages as the position feedback from the actuators encoder takes ‘too long’ due to lower voltages driving the motor.

The battery is buried under the passenger seat and is bit of a faff to access so I don’t know how old the battery is yet. Further investigation required!

I also made a logo (of sorts) in case I ever start a YouTube channel….. Now I might be good with spanners but I can’t draw to save my life, thankfully Chatgpt exists.

Both need further tweaks but I’m using free services so it will take a few more days

That logo’s ace!

Impressive stuff, all of it.

I’ve done a Binners and crayon’d out the 50 & 955 numbers and made the background transparent. I think removing the random wheel is beyond my skillset for now.

The 500 is reference to this Cayenne (and my XC90) costing £500

Tinkering pretty much complete for now.

Front jacking points are a bit exposed and any galvanising has long since disappeared so the light surface rust was removed then my usual routine of Bilt Hamber to kill any pitted rust followed by Jotun epoxy mastic. Undertray refitted with new stainless bolts. Didn’t take any pics.

Ram Xgrip phone mount track attached to the dash top vent.

Had a printing business friend do me a small run of my logo sticker to add to the previous Rothmans and Deus stickers for added coolness.

……and the overnight sailing with dog friendly cabin out of Harwich is booked for the 27th December, the only thing between us and the ferry is the MOT that’s booked for this Tuesday, any fails won’t leave me much time to resolve. Fingers crossed!

Good luck! I think we’re on the same ferry.

We’re on the night sailing to Hook of Holland. Our dog Bert will be prowling around so we should be easy to identify if you to say hi / avoid!!!!

Haha, I’ll say hello if I see you. 🙂

MOT passed! No advisorys!

Tester commented how clean and rust free it was underneath. Here’s to another year of adventures….

Yay!  I’m sure you expected nothing less

I forgot to include that I’d done a bit more logo tinkering – I registered a free account with Adobe Firefly, I think it’s pretty much Chatgpt but with a fancy front end. Adobe Firefly gave me more credits – Chatgpt only allowed a few revisions before locking me out for 24hours.

Anyway, I did a few different colourways. As someone who has no artistic talent at all I was more chuffed with the results of tinkering with digital crayons than I am the car passing it’s MOT today!

I also registered 500overland.com – I just need to actually film and edit something now!

@RNP ,if I am ever in an unfortunate situation that involves a plane crash on a desert/remote island,I want you to be one of the other survivors.

#flightofthephoenix  😉 🙂

…DC perm mag motor with multi stage epicyclic reduction box to operate the transfer case and a quadrature channel encoder for feedback of position.

I’ve about 5% of an idea what this means, but by golly, it’s very a very satisfying sentence to read.