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1999 996 C2 3.7

Great write up Mallone! Funnily enough your car was the final decider on me jumping back into 996 ownership! I had seen the car for sale at Northway (Where I had bought a 996TT some years before) and was so inspired by it! Unfortunately at the time I was in Australia and a couple of days before flying back (Having decided on a trip to Northway) only to find it had sold!

Still. After a brief bout of disappointment I managed to find the silver Aerokit I ended up buying anyway!

Interestingly enough I too have replaced to engine mounts (Though I went the RSS route). Fantastic upgrade over the worn originals which made it feel like two fat blokes wrestling in the boot when cornering! Have also fitted some Ohlins R&T coilovers and countless other little "Tweeks" since.

Absolutely loving my Carrera now (Even more than my 996TT believe it or not!) so please pass on my thanks to your car for providing the final impetus to buy it!
 
996driver said:
Great update! Sounds very similar to the story I've had since I got my 1998 C2 in May last year. Decent car underneath waiting to be found!

The 12v socket doesn't work on mine so I'm interested to hear what you did to replace yours? Is it a standard Porsche part to use?

MisterCorn said:
If you swap it use the later part, it is a smaller size so fits most new things better. I did a write up on it in my project thread, very cheap.

Yeah. The early cars use a weird spec German size. This is the part to buy: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Genuine-...e=STRK:MEBIDX:IT&_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649

Bit of a fiddle to fit but well worth it. You might be able to get it slightly cheaper direct from Porsche.

mpowerrob said:
Great write up and lovely car!

Always loved the aero kitted 996, would love one in red or yellow, Been contemplating one of these or an early 997, to replace my 996 turbo as thinking of selling to free up some money for an extension.

Where abouts in North London are you, I'm in Cockfosters, I go to ace cafe most last mondays of the month for Porsche night could go up in the porsches some time.

I'm based near Hackney Downs (which some people might consider Central London in all fairness!)

Rather shamefully I've never made it to the Ace Cafe. It's been on the list for a while but was always a bit turned off by the videos on YouTube of guys doing wheelies and burnouts past police vans. Is it always like that?

Dagerous said:
Great write up Mallone! Funnily enough your car was the final decider on me jumping back into 996 ownership! I had seen the car for sale at Northway (Where I had bought a 996TT some years before) and was so inspired by it! Unfortunately at the time I was in Australia and a couple of days before flying back (Having decided on a trip to Northway) only to find it had sold!

Still. After a brief bout of disappointment I managed to find the silver Aerokit I ended up buying anyway!

Interestingly enough I too have replaced to engine mounts (Though I went the RSS route). Fantastic upgrade over the worn originals which made it feel like two fat blokes wrestling in the boot when cornering! Have also fitted some Ohlins R&T coilovers and countless other little "Tweeks" since.

Absolutely loving my Carrera now (Even more than my 996TT believe it or not!) so please pass on my thanks to your car for providing the final impetus to buy it!

The car says thanks! :grin:

The engine mounts made a HUGE difference to the feel of the car. Much more than I expected. A little bit of a trade off with the slight increase in NVH but a really solid upgrade. I had originally gone for the Powerflex gearbox mount at the same time, but with the engine mounts that was too much. Much too harsh for me as a road car, even with the upgraded design with slimmer 'wings'. Had to come out ASAP.

Spent the weekend in Wales doing the EVO triangle (amongst other awesome roads) and generally giving the car a good thrashing while getting it filthy. Seemed a good way to check everything was working before Silverstone this coming weekend. First track day in a 911 so looking forward to exploring it's limits a bit. Hopefully I'll get some photos from the day to share.

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The Wales route. Mega, mega roads in this part of the world.


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Forgot to include any interior pics in my original post. GT3 Console delete makes it feel curiously unique when you've got the much space under the dash.


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Looking filthy and awesome at the services on the way home. I can neither confirm or deny that some 'accidental' doughnuts were performed on the icy surface behind! :D
 
Some amazing driving in North Wales.

I will never forget driving along the B4518 over the Welsh moors and next to Clywedog Reservoir one Sunday as the sun was going down.

Lighting was incredible and roads equally good, it looked like something out of Grand Turismo. Can't wait to take the 996 up there!
 
Mallone said:
Rather shamefully I've never made it to the Ace Cafe. It's been on the list for a while but was always a bit turned off by the videos on YouTube of guys doing wheelies and burnouts past police vans. Is it always like that?

I've never seen anyone doing a wheelie in their Porsche :dont know:












:grin:

PS It's actually a good night :thumb:
 
Thought I'd do a bit of an update on the car over the last few weeks as it's been a bit busy going round race circuits and then being tarted up a bit with some paint.

First up was a track day at Silverstone GP on the 25th. I've raced here before (but in a Clio 182 - quite different speeds down the back straight!) so knew the track, but was really keen to see what the 996 was like to hustle quickly.

We lucked out and managed to get a garage and, although it was pretty grey and cold, the rain stayed away and the track was dry. I was with my racing 'partner in crime' in his 987 Boxster and we were keen to see how they differed.

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So how did it get on? Overall, OK. With room for mechanical improvement.

In terms of driving the car, the balance was good with a sniff of understeer to manage, along with a couple of nice playful slides in the high speed stuff like Copse. Nothing too scary (as long as you remember not to lift!) to manage. I hadn't been massively impressed with the Toyo's that are currently on the car during road drives, but must admit they came alive on track with some heat in them. Might not write them off just yet....

Car felt a tiny bit soft at times and there was a little more body roll than I had expected. What was startling was driving the Boxster back to back with the 996. The 987 is on OE Porsche suspension (not sport or PASM) and it felt WAY WAY softer. It really wallowed around a lot more. Engine placemenet will affect that too but it really surprised me just how different the experience of driving each of them was.

Mechanically things were a bit more of a mixed bag. Engine and gearbox were bulletproof - not a sniff of oil or coolant used - but rather frustratingly the brakes became an issue pretty quickly and I had to manage them most of the day.

After only one fast lap we were getting a lot of vibration from the fronts. Got the car up in the air while they were still hot and could feel a high spot on the disc. Seems that they were slightly warped to begin with, that hadn't ever shown up on the road, but once we put some real effort and heat in to them they were really grumbling. Overall stopping power didn't seem to be affected but the vibration was painful. The brakes are the only thing I haven't changed on the car yet and I now wish I had!

In the end I used the day as a chance to practice my lines and just made sure that we were doing lots of lifting, coasting and gentle braking into the hard stops around the track. That seemed to keep the brakes more or less happy.

The only other mechanical issue that showed up was that by the time I'd got home at the end of the day the welds had failed on one of my Dansk exhaust tips and it was rattling like mad. Caused a few weird looks sat in traffic as it sounded like I'd chucked a load of bolts into the air intake :eek:

Thankfully Design911 were pretty good at sorting it out once I'd sent a bit of evidence and I've already got a new set delivered FOC to go on the car this week.

Overall a good day: engine didn't explode, Silverstone is still a mega track, car handles well, need to sort brakes.


Next up: Paint

Although the pics when I first bought the car made the front bumper look pretty tidy, like a lot of 996's of this vintage they are actually a bit knackered close up. After a local old boy accidentally reversed into me at a set of traffic lights and cracked the lacquer (and gave me £300 in cash on the spot to say sorry. That was unexpected!) I knew it was time to sort it our properly.

I also wanted my paint guy to fill in the various bits of woodscrew butchery caused by badly fitted numberplates over the years (I'm going to go with a stick on plate) and see if he could sort out the really scruffy GT3 front splitter (I'm not paying Porsche £150 for a sliver of hard plastic. Mad money!)

Finally, when my paint guy saw the car he offered to see if he could give the lights a good going over as the plastic was a bit faded and yellowing and my own efforts with a 3M restoration kit had been pretty disappointing.

Thankfully he was able to manage a pretty solid result on all three bits!

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Woodscrew Bodgery filled and sanded

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Primed and ready to go

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Lights sanded, polished and lacquered

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Looking super clean as it was reversing out of the paint shop

I haven't got any pics of the splitter in paint but he was able to sand down, prime and then apply a satin black finish to it. Looks good as new. I'll likely do this myself next time but good to know it can be brought back to life fairly easily.

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Parked up at home looking better than ever. Why oh why do we have to have numberplates that spoil front ends like this!?

And that's the car up to date again. Not likely to get the chance to use it much over the next few weeks as we're in build mode for our new race car and that will keep me busy with the spanners. Time to start planning for a few summer road trips. Might see if I can nip out to the Ace Cafe on the 24th though.....

As always, cheers for reading.
 
Looks great! I do like an aerokit.

I'm sanding my headlights (well, a spare pair...) what grit did you get down to before you lacquered? From what I understand it's best not to go too fine otherwise the lacquer won't adhere particularly well. Speaking of which - what lacquer did you use?
 
Shalmaneser said:
Looks great! I do like an aerokit.

I'm sanding my headlights (well, a spare pair...) what grit did you get down to before you lacquered? From what I understand it's best not to go too fine otherwise the lacquer won't adhere particularly well. Speaking of which - what lacquer did you use?

My paint guy did all of the work on these and I didn't ask him about details. I do know the lacquer was UV resistant but that's about it.

When I was considering doing this properly myself one of the best guides I had found was here: https://www.mk5golfgti.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=26433.0
 
This is lovely, would love to see a photo of the Christmas tree effort!

If I may ask - in what ballpark did you pay for this? I'm in the market for one at the moment and it seems the values are a little all over the place.
 
tcw said:
This is lovely, would love to see a photo of the Christmas tree effort!

If I may ask - in what ballpark did you pay for this? I'm in the market for one at the moment and it seems the values are a little all over the place.

I paid circa £14k for this car. With all of the mods/fixes I've made it probably owes me £16.5k or so. I think that's fair value for a car that's now my perfect spec 996.

With the current mileage I know that it wouldn't get that as a private sale, anything over 100k and values seem to really drop off, but I'm intending to keep this for a fair while so will be interesting to see what happens as more and more cars trip over 100k. History and upkeep always seemed more important to me than just mileage...

RE: The Christmas tree - It's not a great picture, but it is in there! What isn't shown is my other half squashed into the rear seats looking fairly unimpressed! :D

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Mallone said:
tcw said:
This is lovely, would love to see a photo of the Christmas tree effort!

If I may ask - in what ballpark did you pay for this? I'm in the market for one at the moment and it seems the values are a little all over the place.

I paid circa £14k for this car. With all of the mods/fixes I've made it probably owes me £16.5k or so. I think that's fair value for a car that's now my perfect spec 996.

With the current mileage I know that it wouldn't get that as a private sale, anything over 100k and values seem to really drop off, but I'm intending to keep this for a fair while so will be interesting to see what happens as more and more cars trip over 100k. History and upkeep always seemed more important to me than just mileage...

RE: The Christmas tree - It's not a great picture, but it is in there! What isn't shown is my other half squashed into the rear seats looking fairly unimpressed! :D

ExJ8SZSh.jpg

Thanks - sounds like a fair price, it seems people are holding out for more if they can :D

Christmas tree looks great - practical Porsche...
 
Thought it was worth giving this an update as I've been doing a bunch of stuff over the last few months during lockdown and figured this audience might be more interested in my ramblings than my long suffering girlfriend!

When I last updated this the car had recently had a bit of paint but was otherwise, supposedly, 'finished'. The key lesson here is that I really need to stop pretending to myself that I can actually allow any project car to be 'finished' :)

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Making the most of some good weather, long evenings, and awesome B roads


New Brakes
After the Silverstone track day in January the brakes were found pretty wanting, with some big vibration from the front discs at speed. Decided to do a full overhaul with Pagid discs and Textar pads all round, as well as a set of HEL braided lines and a fluid change. I've done brakes on a few 996's/986's in the past and knew of the usual niggles that can show up. This car treated me to a full suite of brake related pain.

The first was that (even after backing off the handbrake mechanism to prevent exactly this...) upon removing the rear disc on the passenger side there was a lot of loud pinging and a bunch of metal springs collapsing out of the hub. That'll be the handbrake assembly then. Arse. Managed to repair some of the fixings and had some other parts from old jobs that I could reuse but still needed some parts from Porsche to get the mechanism back in one piece. £20 for a single spring is a new record for me and was a complete pain on the arse to fit. Adjusting them up each side through the wheel bolt holes is also a crap job. Drum brakes are the work of the devil.

The second issue was a bit more problematic. On these cars you can sometimes run into issues with the caliper mounting bolts stripping the threads in the aluminium hub if they have been over tightened. Guess what someone had done at some point in the past? When I went to remove the top bolt from the front caliper on the passenger side it was already loose and rattling around in the hub..... Hmmm. Not ideal. It was bad enough that I could literally pull the bolt out of the hub by hand. There was nothing holding it in and it wouldn't take any torque.

Seems that at some point in the past someone had completely shagged the thread in the hub and just decided to.....leave it. Complete madness. Given I'd been on track a few weeks earlier I was pretty f'ing miffed, mostly with myself for not checking the brakes a bit better, but also a little bit with previous owners/garages that had worked on the car and not bothered to check the caliper. Someone actively decided to leave the bolt like that. Makes me pretty angry when it comes to safety stuff like that. Grrrr.

No pictures of the brake job because......they are brakes and we've all seen them, and also because I was too pissed off to take photos.

At this point the car went into AMS to get the hub helicoiled and I also asked them to sort out the braided lines.

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Thankfully that job went pretty smoothly, other than HEL initially sending the wrong lines, and the helicoil in the hub worked out so the brakes were finally sorted. Now they've bedded in a bit they are proving to be pretty excellent. A really solid pedal that can be modulated nicely and with strong overall stopping power. Even stock Porsche brakes are really, really good when in good shape.


New Lights (sort of)
When I first picked up the car I'd quickly installed a set of H7R HID bulbs and ballasts into the back of the standard 996 light units. The factory halogens are like glow worms. Terrible! It's a tight fit to get all the HID hardware in the back of the light unit but I'd done this before on my previous 996 without issue. This time around, and with a more powerful HID kit, things were getting a bit too hot and I was starting to cook ballasts/bulbs.

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This was a proper squeeze to get in. Wasn't really going to last. Should have done It properly first time round!

Knowing that the standard Litronic units just bolt the ballasts to the back of the light units I knew I had some space behind the lights/above the wheel arch liner to play with. After I'd got the tape measure out to check my working, and following a bit of fettling with the Dremel and drill, I had a set of these ready to go:

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It looks slightly heath Robinson but is actually really solidly mounted and all of the heat issues have disappeared. The ballasts now sit in nice cool air. A solid upgrade and, although some people really moan about HID's being used in reflector headlights, these H7R bulbs result in a really clean cut off of the beam pattern.


Interior Trim
Sorting this has been a multi month labour of love and some of you might have seen my other threads requesting help with interior rattles and trying to source random trim clips during lockdown.

The problem is really simple: I literally cannot stand rattles from a car interior. It drives me insane.

This car seemed to have more rattles than any other car I've ever driven. Even convertibles I've owned that had the body stiffness of jelly were better than this. I had to fix it.

Based on the amount of rogue speaker wire I've discovered throughout the car it's clear that at some point in it's life this car had a serious stereo installed and that, along with a particularly invasive immobiliser/tracker install, gave me reason to suspect that most of the interior had been apart at various times and my guess was that it had never really been put back together properly. There was only one thing to do to solve this - pull it all out, replace all the trim clips, add felt and foam to anything that might move/rub/rattle/annoy me in any way and then put it all back together again.

Doing all this during lockdown, and with Porsche parts departments closed in the UK, meant I had to rely on Teile.com for most of my parts. I'm not sure I can ever bring myself to disclose just how much money I spent on having a bunch of random trim clips delivered to the UK from Germany...:eek: :)

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With the centre console out I took the opportunity to install a 997 shifter housing. Well worth it. Good upgrade.

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Don't worry, the hardback seat isn't resting directly on the tarmac, there's a floor mat under there protecting it!

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Doing this on a very hot, 25c, day was a big mistake. I was sweating BUCKETS crawling around in the back of the car.

It turned into a massive job and I ended up pulling nearly the entire interior out.

As predicted, a huge amount of the trim clips were wrong, missing, or fitted incorrectly and I spent what felt like days cleaning up every interior panel. Now it's back together the difference is ENORMOUS. Adding sound deadening and felt tape to all of the major panels made a huge difference. A lot of the leather rubbing/squeaking is gone and the whole car now feels like it's made from one solid piece of material. Complete OCD overload, and I'm certain my neighbours think I am going completely mad, but it was well worth it.

While I was on a bit of a trim mission I also wanted to solve another little annoyance. When I'd removed the CD changer from the frunk it left a bit of a gap between the plastic trim and the carpet section. Bugged me every time I used the boot.

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After a bit of part number Cluedo while browsing the 996 Katalog and I noticed there was a version for cars without CD changers. A bit of eBay hunting and £8 later and it was one more thing ticked off the list.

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Sometimes it really is the little things...


MOMO Wheel
This is wholly unoriginal these days on a 996 but having felt the difference a new wheel can make on our race car I knew I wanted to switch the standard Porsche wheel over to a MOMO one. I wasn't initially sure about the idea of disabling the airbag, but given I'll happily jump on my motorbike, or take any of my older cars for a spin, without a second thought for any safety systems I decided to go for it.

It's an expensive upgrade, you're definitely paying for some Italian flair and branding, but I can't deny it felt really, really nice the first time I got a hold of it.

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There are a lot of fitting guides online for this so I'm not going to write another one (and I've already written way too much in this update anyway....) but it was fairly straightforward. I got hold of a second clock spring unit to harvest the aribag and horn cables from so everything is reversible if needed. I had similar issues with the grounding for the horn that others have run into, but had already run an earth behind the steering column for the OBC retrofit I did late last year so just tapped into that. Job done.

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Looks great, feels great. Has made a genuine difference to how the car drives, as weird as that sounds.

And that's it for now. Those were all of the major jobs on the car since February. Phew.

I also thought I'd add a selection of smaller bits and pieces below, alongside some glory shots of the car looking shiny when it actually gets a wash every now and then.

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Stumbled across an advert on Gumtree for a set of mint Porsche EP4110 Big Oval exhaust tips for just £40. Bargain! Looking much better than the Dansk tips.


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Still not 100% sure on this one but wanted to try and see what the car looked like with just a simple 911 rear badge. Sometimes I think it looks great, sometimes I think it shouldn't have anything, sometimes I think I should go back to a standard Carrera badge. First world problems.


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Had a few legitimate reasons to have to drive through London during Lockdown so wanted to at exercise the car a bit rather than cycle. Felt pretty insane basically being one of very, very few cars on the road in Central at night. Was like a ghost town.


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Keeping some good company on a drive out with a car club local to me last weekend. New stick on front plate shown in this one. Not sure it will hang around much longer. Can't stand how it bends up the sides of the bumper from this angle.


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Various shots of the car looking clean for a change. Looks good from afar but it's got its fair share of swirl marks close up. Black is a nightmare to keep clean. Really need to learn how to do a bit of paint correction...

It goes into AMS again next week to get some new tuning forks and coffin arms fitted as I'm getting a few knocks and creaks from the front end but then that's it for a while. I think. Maybe. Probably. Though I am tempted by a set of Recaro's......:)

As always, thanks for reading :bye:
 
Great work and write up Mallone ..

Car looks beautiful..

Our cars really are becoming twins 😁
The momo wheel really is a lovely upgrade and enhances the feel and drive no end doesn't it. I have a similar wheel but with alcantara rather than leather.

Also have a '911" badge ready to replace the Carrera badge. Just not got round to fitting yet..

Next rear wiper delete ? :puh:

Be great to get these side by side when we can .. keep up the good work :grin: :thumb:
 
Fantastic write up! You clearly put effort into that - titles, text and captions - and it stands out. Also OCD and disappointment with previous bodgery we can all relate to!
 
Great work on the car. Lots of good projects!

Whose hid kit did you use please?
 

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