Last thing to tackle on my off season list was the hvac blend doors. They have holes in them and Porsche covers them in foam, which degrades over time, allowing the air to mix, meaning luke warm heat/AC and the air not going thru the vents that you want. Apparently this is something that affects all 996/997/986/987's. I watched a few YT videos, there are two ways to tackle this, either thru the frunk, which requires quite a bit more disassembly, or thru the vent behind the radio. I decided to go thru the vent behind the radio.
Popping the radio out is super easy, remove the horseshoe, unplug all the harnesses for the buttons, remove 4 T20 torx bolts and slide out the radio. Unplug it. Now you're starting at the vent in question, which you need to slice open to get to the blend doors. This is where things started to get a little strange. My car is a 2003, most of the videos I was seeing were from cars that were 1999-2001. Their vents are definitely different than mine. Hmmm, not only in shape, but mine has a foam surround on the top of it to help seal it to the vents themselves that the older cars don't have.
Ok, decision made to cut a window into the vent and take a peek. So I do that and go to fold down the plastic so I can see in there. The plastic vent on the bottom breaks off, doh! Well, it broke off because on my vent there's a plastic reinforcement there that the earlier cars also don't have.
See it on the bottom right there? What do you also see? Yep, all my foam is totally intact! Not only that, but my foam looks like a closed cell foam that isn't going to degrade vs what everyone else is showing on their cars/videos. So I just put my cut plastic window back into place and used black gorilla tape to seal it all back up and put it all back together.
If that foam in my car ever degrades, I'm going to have to use the other method of going in thru the top of the heater box in the frunk, as there's no way my hands will fit through the opening in the vent I made and there's no way to make the opening bigger.
In other news, I'm supposed to hit the track next weekend for my first event but it's going to be 25-45F that day, plus my sons soccer team late scheduled a game that day. So I think I'm going to cancel, track driving is supposed to be fun and it's not going to be fun if I'm freezing my butt off out there all day...