HALTING AN ENGINEMELTDOWN IN ITS TRACKS

I make no apologies for including here another item from the MCE Porsche casebook – albeit rather less catastrophic than the 996 engine failure that I shall tell you about next time.

The photo on the right shows the coolant pump from a 2005 987 Boxster. If you look closely you will see that it has suffered pretty much the same fate as the one from the 924S in last month’s how-to story. Essentially the bearing for the central shaft has for some reason become worn, allowing the impeller to move off-centre, and to start neatly machining away the inside of the pump’s light-alloy body.

The car’s owner had quite a lucky escape, suggests MCE proprietor Mike Champion. Some distance from home on a long drive, he had gradually become aware of a light metallic rubbing noise from behind him in the 987’s cabin, and sensibly called Mike to see what he thought.

‘Obviously I had no way of diagnosing it over the phone,’ recalls Mike, ‘so all I could do was advise caution, and suggest he bring the car to me as soon as possible. In the event, he managed about another hour’s driving, but then the low-coolant light came on. He stopped at the next service area, and there was a tell-tale pool of liquid trickling out from under the car, so he had no alternative but to send for a recovery truck. Luckily, though, there appears to have been no damage to the engine.’

The bill came to around £350 (pump, gasket, and nine litres of coolant, plus three hours’ labour), but clearly it could have been much worse. So the morals of the story are, I hope, pretty clear. One: don’t assume that any noise (or leak) from your Porsche will cure itself. It is surely the sign of worse to come. Two: accept wise counsel from your chosen expert (or from your own intuition). And three: while there was no obvious contamination of the coolant, or diminution of its corrosioninhibiting properties, there was no way of knowing how old it might have been, and as it ages it will lose some or all of those vital abilities.

Part of the wider problem, as I suggested in that 924S story, is that in the same way that some people try to tell themselves that everything will be alright, just as many, if not more, assume that modern so-called ‘long-life’ coolants last for ever. Sadly, just like everything else in the known universe, they do not. PW