Hello, I'm not new to Porsches but new to the 986 Boxster. My son was looking for a manual transmission car that we could work on. We found a '98 986 with under 100k miles and it already has the LN Engineering IMS retrofit kit. There are 4 issues with the car that we would like to address and we hope the wisdom of the forum can help us out. The issues are...
- The windows don't operator correctly when opening and closing the doors. Driver's side goes down when you open the door but immediately goes back up. Passenger's door isn't moving up/down at all with opening/closing the door.
- When we lock the doors manually, we sometimes hear the horn beep twice - which I believe indicates a locking issue. I'm not sure if this is related to microswitch in the door handle reporting the wrong state? BTW, I only have a single key and the fob board has clearly gone through the wash and is corroded - so would like to get a spare key and have each key have a working fob (is going to Porsche the only way to get the car programed?)
- The original Becker CDR-210 radio randomly turns off and back on when you are trying to listen to it. I've cleaned the contacts and made sure the faceplate is solidly attached. I haven't tested this enough to be sure but it seems to work perfectly when I switch the ignition on by one notch but show the power issue when the car is running so I'm guessing it is the ignition switch???
- The rear spoiler can be manually moved up/down by the footwell switch but the warning light comes on in the dash after you hit a speed it should go up automatically. I have noticed the spoiler doesn't go down smoothly when you manually operate it so we were going to pull it and perhaps lube the tubes for the arms.
I bought the icarsoft reader hoping that the Porsche specific codes for the door microswitches would show up but no luck - or I'm not seeing the right screen in the reader. We would like to find other 986/987 owners in the Bay Area and hope to leverage the wisdom of the forum to help us get the Boxster up and running 100% (and hope to give back too). We will do a search but we would like to hear people's experiences on replacing the door microswitches and the handle mechanism. Curious if it is worth debugging or simply buying all new replacement parts and replacing all at once. Also thoughts on Genuine Porsche parts vs. other brands (and I've read that you can use VW parts that can be cheaper too).