Hi gang. Hope all are well.
General: Bought my '09
987.2
in August of 2020 with 33K miles. Thought it could be an investment or just my first
Porsche
till I get a
911
someday. Fell in love with it and can't imagine selling it now. Just hit 40K miles a couple weeks ago. Have used the car as an opportunity to learn how to do basic maintenance with the help of my car orientated buddies. When I bought it from a dealer the maintenance record was clean and I took it to Independent
Porsche
guy who gave me the green light as a second opinion. I took it back to that dealership where I bought it maybe twice. Felt the service manager screwed me over on pricing for sometime simple one time so didn't take it back to them.
Habits: I take it out on valley drives or meet-ups about once a month at most. I have driven it up the CA coast once. It's not my daily and it sits fully in a garage and I detail it myself when it needs cleaned.
Situation: I took it to another dealer three months ago for a all around liquid/fluid check and alignment. This dealership is in another city (as was the one I bought from), just about thirty minutes down the freeway. When I pick up my car they tell me that they could not get the slight pulling-to-the-right fixed because the right front, right rear, and left rear chambers are maxed out. See picture. They said that it would take a special diagnostic procedure to figure out if perhaps the axel or perhaps "swing axel" is bent (which sounds expensive AF). And it's now due for its 40k schedule maintenance. I was and am suspicious. I mean it is what it is; but here's the deal. I have never hit a curb. I have never been hit. I don't drive crazily. I even did that
Porsche
driver ed course to learn how to stay in control as best as possible. And as a brother of a dealership owner, I'm suspicious of dealerships.
Question: Do axels just bend by over use? If I take it to another dealership, won't they see in the
Porsche
dealership records that this is a pending issue to charge me for? Should I be suspicious enough to avoid the last dealership? Do any of you avoid
Porsche
dealerships and just work with independent shops? As I noted, I would like this car to appreciate and I generally baby it. So I'm questioning how something that got a clean bill of health at purchase has bent an axil (possibly) without any incidents. I don't want to be "taken" by a dealer/service manager because I don't know enough about cars. And also, I'm bummed someday when I sell this (if I do), this will now show up as the only thing that happened on my watch and the car will depreciate.
If you read this far, I salute you. If you answer this and live in LA, I'd get you a donut someday.
Thanks,
David
I wouldn’t worry about the
next
owner. I’m not from the states either but are there any suspension/geometry specialists in your area? They may be able to give you a second opinion
Find out where the guys who track their cars get them aligned.
Go there!
My 2010
Cayman
has only been to a dealer for warranty work. And that work was so sloppy I would never think of returning and paying them. All non-warranty maintenance was either done my myself or a trusted indy.
AFA bent axel, we don't even have an axel. We have swing (half) axels. I can not image how much force it would take to bend one of these. It would likely leave other visible damage. When you bought it, I'm assuming it had a clean carfax with no reported accidents.
I'd find a good indy.
In the front the strut tops are slotted and are accessible once you remove the plastic trim pieces, you can easily check if they are in the same location. It might just be that one side is in the middle position and the other pushed inwards for extra negative camber. First thing I do in these cars is to push them as far in possible for max negative camber, takes a a few minutes per side with basic tools (
floor jack
and 12 or 13mm if I recall correctly) and torque spec is 24 ft-lbs.
Rear are ~-1.5 does not seem too bad but they clearly did not make any effort to match the two sides.
I would look for an alignment place. If you were in Bay Area I would have given you several suggestions but sadly not familiar with LA shops.
I can't see that they made any effort to correct the alignment. The before and after numbers are basically identical (within the margin of error on the machine..)
There is a race-oriented
Porsche
shop in the Van Nuys airport area. I might have their name somewhere.. they seemed competent the one time I used them. It would be worth checking if they do alignments.
Found it:
TRE Motorsports - Schedule Your Porsche for Service with TRE Motorsports
- they seemed big in aircooled cars and racing. They were fairly priced and competent for what I had done. Recommended.
Those rear camber and toe setting are fine. The front left camber is well out though, why hasn’t that been corrected?
For a road set up on these cars you want.
front
camber - .7degrees
Toe 0.02
rear
camber 1.5
Toe 0.08
if you had lowered the car and wanted
A ‘fast road’ set up, You would have more adjustability, in this case I’d increase the front camber to 1.2 and tray to 2.0 degrees.
Thank you! I forgot about this place (or thought they only did classic older Porsches). But it was this place back in the early days of COVID that I just stopped and asked what to buy as a first time buyer, which led to Jeremy (there) saying "987.2 2009 or later." And here I am really happy with his advice. Looks like I'll be paying him a visit soon. Appreciate the reminder about TRE.
I once had my car aligned at a
Firestone
shop. I only had it aligned, because I put new
tires
on it. They said the right rear was way out. They adjusted - a year later the right rear tire was worn out. So - although the Hunter machine may be a great tool, some of the people operating the machine are not good.
Unfortunately, something is likely bent on the front passenger side as you can't achieve that level of camber with the factory suspension parts. It is also likely the source of your steering issue. My guess is one of the control arms is slightly bent from the car impacting a curb before you bought it.
Does anyone know if the
987.1
w/Litronics and
987.2
share the same front LCA's ( lower control arms). I have 2,
987.1
LCA's (w/Litronics) with approx 2k miles on the right (impact damage had to change) and 54k miles on the left. Yours if you could use them. Just pay shipping. Upgraded to
GT3
style to get more negative camber.
Let me know if this could help. Soonest I could send would be 3/28 (gonna be out of US).
Eyes up, look ahead😁
