This rather lovely Porsche 911 Carrera S came to the work shop with the dreaded slow start issue that plagues a lot of Porsches of this generation. Porsche specialist had wanted to take the engine apart to replace the starter motor along with the battery cable that runs full length of the car. At an hourly rate of around £100 plus parts this would have cost a fortune so the owner of this one asked if there was anything I could do to improve the issue without braking the bank.
The first thing I did was un clip the battery cable from the junction box stud located on the bulk head. As I suspected the stud that carries the current from the battery to the junction box was rusty.
The inside of the press fit battery cable also had signes of rust. This may seem insignificant but this is actually enough to prevent current flowing freely between these two parts and therefore stopping enough power reaching the starter motor.
The difficult parts was removing the stud from the junction box as it only accessible from a very tight space in the passenger foot well at the very top of the box.
Once removed the stud is put in the vice and a thread is topped onto it.
Now refitted in position with the press fit method having been replaced with a lock nut insuring a clean and permanent connection.
The job isn’t quite finished yet though. There is still more I could do to improve matters. There is another connection under the car that connects the cable from the junction box to another cable just before it enters the engine bay at the back of the car. To insure a good connection hear the mating surfaces are cleaned. Finally the rubber cable cover is stripped back to reveal the wire and a healthy amount of solder is fed into the crimped connection. This will insure a perfect connection in the likely case that oxidation has formed between the two.
These two repaired have now greatly improved the starting of this car and for a fraction of the cost it would have been.
There is only one more connection left that may have needed work but that is attached to the starter motor. Removing that would involve a lot of the engine coming apart and that is not what we wanted to do in this case.
Some times it’s just better to repair than to replace!
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