In case you don't know, my wife's car has been giving me fits. Last week the coolant pipes blew. She drove it 5 miles home with a blood bath pouring out of the underneath. She said the temp gauge never got more that 240*. The damn instrument cluster, however, lit up like an F-18's being painted. Upon tear down I found that 3 of it's four gallons had puked itself all over the freeway. Basically, I had no coolant spillage when I removed any of the parts! Luckily the engine is still running good.
If you don't know, the pipes are made of plastic and WILL fail prematurely. Bad design on Porsche's part. The really bad is that you never realize you have a problem until it takes a shit on you at the most inopportune time, aside from a faint coolant smell and maybe adding coolant frequently, it is a ticking time bomb. This issue is so prevalent that Porsche has issued new upgraded aluminum parts for the repair. A few retailers offer an all inclusive kit with absolutely everything you need to do the job, including the coolant. I took the extra time and changed a few other things while I had it torn down.
These replacement parts are very high quality utilizing machined nozzles, double o-rings and very, very tight fit. This should last the life of the vehicle.
Also, these pipes run on top of the engine block and under the intake manifold. This makes for a very time consuming job of some pretty fucking painful dis-assembly. 8-10 hours for a tech and about 16 for me. There were no less than 1,000 electrical connections and 10,000 fucking vacuum and head/crankcase breather lines. (exaggeration, duh)
A step by step is not useful here but if your interested then go to this site. (wish I would have seen this prior to doing the job)
http://www.ecstuning.com/stage/edoc/CoolantpipeProofversion1.1_1202012.pdf
What was done?
4-new aluminum coolant pipes
1-new t-stat
1-new water pump
1-new drive belt
3-fresh gallons of 50/50 coolant
On to the pics with captions:
vv: Pre-op
vv: Tear down complete.
vv: Three upper pipes and one big one underneath.
vv: Yep, that's the starter. Nice design, huh? Notice the coolant pooling underneath.
vv: T-stat housing/water distribution box. Water pump below.
vv: Lower pipe installed.
vv: New T-stat installed. Removal of remaining plastic pipe bits.
vv: Upper pipes installed with T-stat/dist. water box.
Now reassembly and for a fill and burp.
Test drive proved no leaks and temps were solid.
I hope this is the last I see of this car for awhile.