997 Supercharger Part IV:

With most of the wiring buttoned up, it was time to start looking at the cooling system: With that, the front bumper needs to come off. Remove the front wheels.

And the front fender liners and associated screws with the front bumper cover. Hint: Yes, the side markers can be pulled out from the outside, but you will never get them to seat right due to the metal tab bending. Instead, you can slide a screwdriver between the fender liner and bumper and release the shiny metal tab seen here, and the side marker will pop right out.

The last thing to do is to pull your hidden clips. I use a 90 degree hose pick tool for this. Grab it and pull out.

Then you can slide the bumper off. Remember to tape the rear corners of the fenders by the side marker lights so you don’t scratch anything.

And staring at a lot more craziness.

Now since this car already had the 3rd radiator, we need to revert back to the 2 radiator setup. The hose seen here (and another on the other side which is much harder to get to, lol, need to be removed and have caps installed in their place. Caps for both sides with hardware should run about 20 bucks from a normal honest dealer like sunset, or $50 from our local rip off dealer….but I need them fast, so local is the way to go, lol. What does this mean for you guys? Not much. What does it mean for me? I’ll be taking a coolant shower, I just know it!

The hoses laid out. You can lay out all the components to get an idea of where to run lines and what lines go where. It is easy to mix up the lines and get confused, so lay them out, and install one line at a time.

Here you can see the front radiator and reservoir tank hookups.

Now, the pictures above show you how the lines typically run. Unfortunately, with our Tip, that ain’t gonna work. The electric water pump that pushes coolant through this entirely separate system is normally mounted on the driver’s side of the transaxle on a cross member. With the tiptronic, there is zero room over there, so I need to mount it on the passenger side. This obviously completely hoses you (get it, lol) on the prefabbed lines. So…….we are going to improvise a little, move lines here and there, shorten lines, lengthen lines, and do whatever it takes to get it done.

So, on to mounting the electric pump bracket. We need to drill two holes in the cross member, so off it comes, and out comes the big boy drill…..har har har.

With the bracket mounted, loosely fit the pump for now. We need to be able to rotate it once we start getting the lines installed to make the proper angle, so for now it will just kind of hang in place until I get the engine bay line routed down to it.

911997PorscheSuperchargerVF Engineering