951 Radiator

Dave dropped off his 951S to have me go through the cooling system. The car was starting to get fairly hot in stop and go traffic in our lovely 100 degree heat, so it was time to do some preventative maintenance on the front end. We decided it was best to replace the 25 year old radiator and any associated hoses to get the car cooling as optimally as possible. The car was hitting the top white line of the temp gauge in traffic, so we wanted to cure that. A new radiator and a 75c fan switch should take care of the issue.

All bibbed up and ready to go. For the turbo cars, you need to pull the radiator out the top due to the interference of the oil cooler and lines.

Draining coolant is never a clean job, so tend to just put a couple of buckets and pans under the car, yank a few hoses and walk away.

The cooling port on the waterpump comes off as well as the distributor cap. It is a really tight fit coming out the top.

After the fans are removed, the old radiator is ready to come out. It takes some manipulation to get past the oil cooler line, but it will come through.

And out.

And the new radiator in with a new thermostat switch installed. Piece of advice…..once the radiator is in, plug in your fan temp switch into the wiring harness. I got everything back together (without coolant thank god), plugged the switch in and the fans kicked on. Uh…crap. The new fan switch I got was bad. Usually when these switches fail, the cooling fans will run until the battery dies. If you check this before putting the fans and coolant in, it is a lot easier to remove (you can use a wrench vs a large deepwell socket that is needed with the fans in place). Luckily, I keep about as many of these spare switches on hand as I do boxster/996 ignition switches.

And everything back together. A quick drive around the block indicates we are now cooling at a much more efficient level and keeping the temps down better.

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