MAKING ALL THE RIGHT CONNECTIONS

Another 996, yet another electrical issue. Over at Auto Umbau, proprietor Robin Mckenzie was in the closing stages of reassembling the secondhand engine lid of a 911 Carrera project, after having it stripped and repainted. The original panel had comprehensively corroded along its bottom edge, after moisture had crept behind the seam-sealer covering the bent-over metal flange. Naturally this had involved transposing all of the hardware, including that for raising and lowering the rear spoiler, and now the latter appeared to be defunct.

Robin – rather generously, I thought – was giving Porsche the benefit of the doubt, and suggesting that he might have transposed two of the three micro-switches within the mechanism, such that now the electrical system couldn’t tell whether the wing was raised or lowered. He had not done so, of course, and it turned out to be an almost impossibly small fault within one of the switches itself: the tiny plastic ‘pip’ via which the movement of the geared rack actuates the internal contacts had somehow come adrift, killing the thing stone-dead.

Plainly a replacement switch is going to be needed, either new from Porsche or, depending on cost (and availability), another secondhand item, and at the time of writing that remains to be decided. Either way, it will come as part of the enginecompartment sub-harness, and will have to be joined to the rest of the car’s electrical system. Luckily, Porsche provides a convenient plugand-socket connection next to the right-hand gas strut for the engine lid, but this leaves you with the problem of breaking and satisfactorily remaking the connection to the high-level stop light.

At this stage you, and probably I, would no doubt have been reaching for a box of common-or-garden crimp connectors. And in truth those are – when properly fitted – electrically perfectly sound. But Robin is a stickler for originality or, where that cannot be achieved, then something that does at least look as though Porsche itself might have specified it. His choice, then, was one of the same Delphi Metri-pack devices used for that primary connection, but obviously here just a two-way job. (They are readily available at uk.rs-online.com.)

In fact, even these blocks require the internal terminals to be crimped to the ends of the wires, crucially after the fitting of the tiny flexible seals designed to keep water out of the entire device. (And there is, of course, a similar presumably synthetic rubber seal between the two halves.) The accompanying photos explain how it all works, and suffice it to say that while I had to leave with the spoiler still not operating, I have no doubt that it will be back up to speed again by the time you read this. PW

Robin Mckenzie (top left) had assumed that this 996’s rear wing had ceased to function because he might inadvertently have transposed two of the mechanism’s microswitches when rebuilding it – that task occasioned by fitting a second-hand engine lid to replace the car’s corroded original, and obviously needing to swop over all the hardware. Horton thought that was highly unlikely of a man of Robin’s skill – and so it proved. In fact, one of the pair of switches (middle photo in the middle row) had lost its tiny internal ‘pip’ (arrowed). Whether the car gets a new partial harness or a second-hand one remains to be seen, but either way Robin has prepared the adjacent wiring to the high-level brake light by fitting an easily detachable Oe-style connector. There is no place for anything less in any car, and certainly not in a Porsche