BLOWING HOT AND COLD
Disturbing though it may have been in a machine of that nature, the noise from Simon’s 996 Turbo (see previous page) was of no great consequence. He could have lived with it if he really had to, and the car would have suffered no long-term damage.
Some noises, however, are unbearable. Like the one from this heater blower motor from a 911SC (below). You don’t need to be much of an engineer to appreciate that the hole through the armature shaft’s end-plate should be round rather than that elongated oval, or to imagine that the resulting noise and vibration the thing must have been generating would have been truly appalling.
The obvious answer is a complete replacement blower motor. They are still available from Porsche, I’m told, but are naturally quite costly, and not always ‘on the shelf’. After-market to the rescue, then – and in this case Dansk.
Trouble is, as Auto Umbau’s Terry Parker discovered while attending to a customer’s car recently, the latter item appears to be something of a one-size-fitsall job also intended for much later models, with the result that certain minor modifications are needed.
The most obvious is to ‘reverse-engineer’ the electrical connections from the later round-pin type, mounted on the motor body, to the earlier flat-blade kind on the end of a flying lead. I missed capturing that sequence, but basically it involves no more than some careful soldering, says Terry.
There are differences between the two motor housings, as well, such that ideally you do need to retain the old one. That’s easy enough, too, thanks to the simple three-point fixing with good, old-fashioned nuts and washers on M5 studs (a drop of Loctite wouldn’t go amiss, or even Nyloc nuts), and luckily the projecting flange on the other side of the housing is of no great consequence.
The only other thing you might want to do would be to have the old housing powder-coated, but that’s up to you.