Hi there. I’m Saul Reisman here at Saul’s AUTOTEK. And today we’re going to talk to you a little bit about Porsches and how we can service yours, take care of it, and keep you on the road, especially in a state here like Colorado.
Now, these vehicles were not designed for the roads in Colorado in the aspect of what we see in the wintertime, what kind of issues we see with the quality and condition of our road in the city. However, they’re fantastic handling and performing vehicle, and they truly shine here in the mountains of Colorado. And as a result, the ownership is actually on its way up in this state. The number of Porsches that are being built and sold in this area is actually going up pretty quickly compared to what we’ve seen in other areas.
We’ve seen a very very recent influx in these vehicles coming to the state. And we’ve also had to step up our service and learn how to best approach and how to appropriately solve all the commonality problems we see with them. In the case of this Boxster that came into us today, when this vehicle came in, it was leaking coolant pretty substantially. It was very obvious that the water pump was leaking down, and the owner had been quoted for over $3,000 repair from the dealership, being told that the motor must be removed in order to service it.
However, with what we do here, we take a more conservative approach, and we wanted to see how we could best solve this Porche Denver auto repair problem, and hopefully not break the bank. The pump itself is a very inexpensive part. It’s only two or three hundred dollars, so being that it’s only 10% of the cost for the repair, there must be a substantial labor anomaly there. When we looked at the factory service manual, produced by Volkswagen Auto group on how to service the vehicle, it shows that the entire job must be done with the engine out of the vehicle or you must completely disassemble the most passenger side of the vehicle interior, exterior from above and below in order to service it.
We were able to remove and replace this water pump doing all of our services from below. We actually removed a panel from the interior, simply so we could show you a little bit better eyesight of where this pump’s located, how it’s serviced, and hopefully how we can help you save a few bucks on replacement with yours. If you’ve got a vehicle like this, you may even be able to do this service yourself. Now the engine in this vehicle is a Boxster engine, which just like a design in a similar Subaru is a horizontally opposed engine. So we’ll have pistons sitting in this motor firing on one side and firing to the other side. Now we’re in the passenger compartment right now, directly behind the front seats. The front of the engine is directly behind the driver’s back. So you’ll definitely know, hear, and feel any performance issues with this motor.
The water pump sits all the way down in the bottom corner, just past where we can see underneath this alternator just below. And we just wanted to simply show you where this motor sits up close behind the passengers, so you could really see what’s involved here. Now according to the service procedure, this entire assembly has to be removed, dropped out the bottom of the car to be serviced. We’re going to pick it up and show you exactly how we did this job.
When we get underneath the vehicle, we can see the motor sitting directly above us, facing toward the front of the vehicle. Now we left our hoses off this water pump so that we’d be able to show you exactly where this guy sits up under the vehicle. From its standpoint, there’s no other accessibility. We can only see a few of the bottom bolts on the housing. And to get clearance up into the other end to get to the upper bolts is next to impossible. We actually managed to use some very custom tools that we were able to manufacture in partnership with [Osen Macher 00:03:39] Specialty Tools in order to physically fit up into these gaps and clearance the side of this housing. We kept the old pump so we could show you exactly what the issue and why they want to remove the engine in order to do this service.
If we look at the old pump housing, we can actually see the play in the bearing itself. And that’s what was causing the problem here in allowing coolant to leak through this center bearing externally from the pump. This impeller was simply no longer holding tight. Now where these bolts physically hold it to the engine, it’s oriented in such a way, directly above my head in the same pattern where we can access a few of the bolts from below. We can even get these ones on the side, but there’s one bolt on top actually touches just below the pulley, and cannot be accessed. A socket cannot be placed on the head of the bolt because the clearance between the top of the bolt and this pulley is simply too small to allow that to happen.
Based on its location being on the top side of the pump, a wrench would need to apply from the top side out in order to get a grip onto this bolt, rotate it one facing at a time, 132 times around in order to physically remove it. Doing that with a box wrench would work if there was room, but there’s no way you can fit a box wrench into this location. Where this is sitting, the firewall is directly in front of it, and the engine compartment roof sits directly on top of it. So we actually had Osen Macher Specialty Tools manufacture us a very very short ratchet that we were able to attach just to the end so that we can pivot, like a crow foot style ratchet onto the side of this. This allows us to save 70% of the labor time in this job.
If you’ve got a Porsche vehicle, and you’ve got a concern about this water pump replacement. If you’ve heard that it’s going to be a $3,000 plus insane cost of repair, don’t believe it. Give us a shout here at Saul’s AUTOTEK. We will make the tools to get the job done right, so that we can help you, and help others like you in the future. Give us a call at 303-919-7769. We’re here seven days a week for all your Porsche needs.
Saul’s AUTOTEK is open 365 days a year and we’re here to answer your questions, 303-919-7769.
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