With all the negative stories about stealership nightmares, thought I'd pass along a good story about Porsche of Omaha (Woodhouse)...
I recently noticed when I'd close the top on my LE, the canvas part of the top would slip over the outside of the bottom plastic bow on the passenger side. This left the seam in a very tight / stretched condition that couldn't be good for the stitches of the seam. So whenever I was putting the top up, I'd have to stop it 4-6 in from the windshield post, get out, help the canvas inside the bow, and then finish the top up process.
I stopped by Woodhouse on Thu to see what they thought of it. I wasn't sure if it was caused by some adjustment they made while fixing my broken cables adventure a month ago. The SA said no, it wasn't related. Our tops are held in place by a series of cloth straps and nylon strings (I hope they're nylon) that stretch with age. He said the staps could be reached by undoing some velcro strips that keep the headliner in place and unscrewing some torx bolts to adjust the straps. We set up an appt for Wed to have them fix it but he said I could cancel if I wanted to try and fix it myself.
So I finally had some time tonight to take a shot at it. There are two straps and a nylon string that keep the canvas tucked in. I tried adjusting the smaller of the two straps, but it didn't seem to move. Upon further review, it looked like the string might be the culprit. It ran inside a channel of the bow and out to the top. It was held inside the channel by an elastic band but the band looked like it was stretched out, allowing the string to have less tension on it. I rotated the band to the place where it was sown together, thinking that might be stronger and hadn't been stretched yet. But it still seemed to allow more tolerance than it should. So I got a small zip tie and placed it high enough on the band to keep the string from distorting the band but low enough that it wouldn't rub on the string. And I made sure the female part of the zip tie wouldn't rub against any of the headliner.
Vuala! The top closes like it should. I did the same procedure on the driver's side because it was looking a bit stretched too. It's kind of scary how such delicate fabrics are responsible for some important work.
So back to the reason for the thread - Woodhouse didn't need to tell me how to fix my top. They could have said , "yeah, we can fix that". So now I can cancel my Wed appt and save a cpl Benjamins. Sweet!
Kudos to Woodhouse. :dance:
2001 Boxster S
Linear Mode
