28. Time to go over to the passenger side and remove a bunch of stuff now. Some people remove the hydraulic pump and A/C pump and don’t crack them open. My A/C needed recharged anyway being 14 years old and low, and it seemed more effort than I desired to remove them in the car. So I just broke open the connection. Your choice on what to do. I removed the two hydraulic lines, and the two A/C lines as shown. While you are over here you can also unplug the two large mil-spec electrical quick disconnects. There is one more little electrical connector near the mil-specs. Unplug that too. I couldn’t find it in the pic to show you with engine in. I included a picture of it with engine out to show you the thing I’m talking about. You’ll also want to remove the passenger coolant hose while over here.

 

29. Put an impact on the large nut on the end of the axle. It’ll come right off. Do this to both sides.

 

30. You’ll need to get the axles out of your way now. You’ll already removed the allen head bolts holding the axles to the tranny. Now you need the axles out of your way, which necessitates unhooking some suspension arms. (It’s possible the axles could stay in, but it seemed like more headache than it was worth when lowering my engine considering axles are ~$900 to replace if you goof them up.) The minimum I needed to remove were 3 arms, and the bottom of the shock. The top two arms are simple, a wrench and a ratchet on each side of the bolt, remove it. The shock is the same. The arm on the bottom was a bit harder. You can easily remove the nut on top, but it’s difficult to get it out. There is a torx input on the top of it. Using the torx likely won’t work since it’s so small. You can’t use a torch because it’s got a rubber boot. I find when I use a pickle fork it tears boots. I ended up using a small punch that fit inside of the torx bit section and hit that punch with a sledge hammer. That loosened it and out it came. Do this to both sides. On the passenger side you’ll see a small connector to a sensor that senses movement of the control arms. You’ll want to unhook this with its little 10mm nut and pull it off too.

 

31. With the suspension unhooked, I used a long pry bar to pull the suspension upright back and gain enough room to push the axle out and then remove it completely.

 

32. Next I jacked the engine back onto the mounts and put the nuts back on. I removed the cross brace that we sat the engine on earlier. There is nothing holding the engine in now except the transmission mounts up front and the big two bolts in the back.


33. I got a table to help with my lowering. http://www.harborfreight.com/1000-lb...0438-9328.html I can’t imagine the two jack method not being terrible. As much money as you are saving by doing this yourself, you might as well buy the table. I used wood on the table to make it "fit" the bottom of the engine. Jack the table up until it barely pushes up on the engine. My wood blocks were on each side of the engine pushing on the bottom of the heads on each side.


34. Remove the two engine mounts, and there are two mounts for the tranny at the very front you should also remove. Now all weight is on the table.


35. Lower the engine / tranny combo slowly until you are just a few inches below where it was when it was sitting on the cross brace. You want to be careful here, this thing is really heavy and has the ability to knock your car off the jack stands and cause disaster or even worse, death. STAY OUT FROM UNDER THE CAR while you are lowering. I don’t want to hear someone was following this tutorial and killed themselves.


36. You are a few inches lower than with the cross brace. Go to the driver’s side of the engine bay looking from under / behind the engine mount. There is a second fuel line that wasn’t easy to get to earlier. It’s held in with a 10mm bolt and a seal. Remove the 10mm bolt and pull it out.

 

37. Go to the passenger side, you should be able to find a ground wire that goes from the engine to the body. Remove it.

 

38. Repeat slowly moving a couple of inches down. Once you have enough room up in the engine compartment to be able to see the back stop. This should only be another 2-3 inches at most. You need to unhook the blow off valves, and intake tract. You’ve probably noticed by now that Porsche made the intake tract run through the rear sub-frame, and then bolted those pieces to the engine. (WTF Porsche) We are going to unhook the intake tract so that it stays in the bay while the engine comes down. In the bay unscrew the worm clamp and pull the passenger plastic intake pipe off of the big aluminum piece. Also remove the allen head bolt holding the big aluminum piece in place. There is also a line running from the oil reservoir and the aluminum thing. Remove the clamp there to. Unscrew the worm clamp in the front of the aluminum piece and pull the blow off valves off of it. The aluminum piece should be loose now.


You won’t be able to get the aluminum intake piece out right now, but I thought it would help if you knew the shape of the thing you are dealing with so I’ve attached it.


Ditto you won’t be able to get the Plastic passenger side thing out of the car so I have attached a pic of what it looks like to help you.


Eventually the setup will look like the picture with it all unhooked I’ve attached

 

39. Keep repeating the lower a few inches, and check routine. Go slowly, and check around a lot for anything that you are missing, or anything that might be being pushed on, cracked, or broken. Porsche parts are pricey, you don’t want to break stuff.


40. Keep going down a few inches at a time and checking. Eventually you'll have the table all the way down to its lowest point. If you are only 19-22 inches on the jack stands you’ll notice that this isn’t low enough.

 

41. Assuming everything is unhooked, you now need to raise the car high enough to roll the engine out. I went slowly, and got my rear jack stands up nearly all the way. I didn’t tell you to do this earlier because jack stands tend to get kind of iffy at their max height. This gave me plenty of room to roll the engine out. If you remove the oil fill cap you’ll gain an inch or two that the car doesn’t need to come up further. Once the engine was out I then put the rear jack stands down a few notches so they were stable.

 

42. You are done!




All in all, having now done this, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Porsche clearly spent time to make it *relatively* easy to drop the engine. Nice of them considering they designed it to need the engine out for most services!

 

Wow!!!!!, one of the most informative threads, thank you so much for taking the time to explain with pics, great job. This will come in very handy. Cheers!

 

theres on need to remove the decklid, the slave line, the p/s or the a/c the axles from the control arms the exhaust or the shield.the intake piping isn't removed either. your making way more work than is needed.

 

great thread ! thx for sharing

 

Perhaps, I'm only documenting what I did and what worked for me.

The deck lid is like 4 bolts, super easy to do, and it gets it out of the way so I'd do that either way.

My axles pushed against the transmission. The other alternative would be to lower and keep pushing them away with a pry bar near as I could tell. I'd rather remove them and be safe.

Admittedly the exhaust could have stayed, but then I'd have needed to remove it later for my purposes anyway. Easier to remove it now and not deal with it later to me.

You'll have to explain to me how you could leave intake piping on that runs through the sub frame because. I'm admittedly lost there and perhaps you can show me a trick?

The ps and ac, as already stated my ac was in need of a recharge so that was a no brainer for me vs the hassle of removing it in the super cramped bay. If you don't remove the ac compressor the ps becomes difficult to remove. Hence it just got unhooked too.

Welcome any input to make the process better for others, but please do go into detail not just say I'm doing it wrong

 

Axles move freely and only need to be pushed out of the way. No pry bar needed. Axles need 340 ft/lbs of torque to reinstall. Better left in. Exhaust much easier to remove when heat shields aren't in the way. Remove air box intake piping stays attached disconnect them off the turbos. drops out with the motor. Don't why you want to remove the deck lid it's not in the way at all just more work but your choice. as for the a/c you have to have it connected to charge it. so rather than let what you have escape to the atmosphere leave it attached and reinstall it when your ready to charge it.