951 Coolant Leak

Had a mystery coolant leak in this 951 🙂 Typically when a you start finding coolant on the driver’s side or around the front of the car on a 944, there are a couple of quick (and likely) spots to check. The first one is the coolant port on the radiator for the small expansion tank hose. This is just a screw in fitting with a paper gasket. Over time the gasket will shrink, or the plastic will become brittle, and it will cause a leak. The auxillary fan switch below it also has a paper gasket that will shrink over time and cause a similar leak. With the engine hot, I tried to tighten the top port which usually takes care of the issue if it is leaking. Well the fitting broke in half, so that was a pretty good indication we had an issue there. Of course, with a hot engine I had coolant coming out at a high rate of speed, lol. A new port and gasket should take care of the issue. While in there, I will replace the fan switch as well.

Shop supervisor is on her 2nd wind.

Here you can see the port. The other half is in the radiator, lol

But with soft plastic, you can usually just shove a tool of some sort in it and grip it enough to unscrew it. A torx bit worked in this case.

Now I tend to like challenges when I have the time, so I just couldn’t leave this one alone. The car was having a mystery random door locking problem. Actually the car gave up the answer the moment I closed the door to pull it into the garage. The doors locked. Bingo. One a 944, the door harness runs through the door jamb and into the door. It is very common for area between the door jamb to become a pinch point and the wires will ground themselves out here (can be a door lock, window winder fuse issue, etc). Grabbing the harness at this point, I could move it around and get the door locks to fire. After playing with the harness a little though, I determined that the issue was further inside the door. So off comes the door panel.

I found the issue here at the T junction of the lock actuator wiring and the window switch wiring. The harness was jammed down against the bottom of the door frame. When the window dropped, it also put pressure on the harness, which is why it was jammed so far down. It had also pulled out of the retaining clip against the window channel. Now it is a little fuzzy to me, but it sure seems like the wiring should be routed on the other side of the window channel, which would keep it from getting pinched underneath the window. I’ll have a look at the other side to confirm, but solving the issue shouldn’t be a problem at this point.

Shooting down the interior of the door panel you can see the harness headed up to the switches. That appears to be our pinch point.

944Coolant leakDoor Lock ProblemPorsche