Well...it's been a while here. Not a ton to report though. I ended up spending all autocross season driving other peoples' cars, so I only ever did one event in my car and never had enough free time or money to make it to any track events. Could be worse I suppose. However I did spend the latter half of the year really testing out the "do it all" nature of the car. Around the end of june I had a run-in with a deer in the fiesta, the car sat at the body shop waiting for parts until mid-october, at which point I sold it pretty quickly before the bottom totally dropped out of the used car market. So from july through about a month ago (actually exactly a month ago today) the cayman was my only vehicle. So it spent a lot of time looking like this:
...only usually much dirtier, thanks to the gravel parking lot that it's sitting in. Overall it worked out pretty well and the initial experience gave me the confidence to put off replacing the fiesta as long as possible to wait for used car prices to come down as much as possible. This was the first year since owning it that it's needed two oil changes in a year, which was an exciting milestone of sorts. But I'm also pretty happy that that's over now.
Partially spurred on by needing to rely on the car more, I finally got around to replacing the super dead 2017 era tires. I went with DWS06+ (visible in the above photo) after a good experience with them on the fiesta, and partially hoping for an excuse to have a bit of fun in the snow with the car. Overall it's been a similarly good experience. The tire change made the car a bit pushier, and I'm pretty sure it's because of extra rear grip, not less front grip. Which is a good indication of how dead those tires were, that new performance all seasons have more grip than used performance summer tires with ~half the treadwear rating. And they seem to drive basically the same regardless of weather conditions, which is nice. Come spring/summer I'll probably stiffen the rear sway bar a step, but for now this setting is good a tiny bit of extra cold/wet weather safety.
Now that I have a second vehicle again and the roads are pretty consistently salty, it's time to do some winter work.
I've wanted to replace the exhaust for a while; one or both of the mufflers have a few small leaks and it just doesn't sound great in normal driving - light throttle, low rpm. But this is one of those semi-rare cases where the porsche tax is very real, so even though the "catback" is two mufflers and about 4' of tubing, aftermarket replacements are expensive and people seem to think takeoff stock ones are just as valuable. I'm also secretly old and really don't like overly loud exhausts and am not tolerant of cruising drone at all, so that kind of limits the options some. If I had a bigger budget I would have retrofitted the factory valved sport exhaust, but that's like $2500 in parts plus a trip to the dealer to get the mode switch programmed in, not worth it to me. But over the summer I happened to stumble across someone on ebay selling a modified stock exhaust for super cheap. I think I didn't even know this existed at the time - it's called the Carnewal GT mod. Basically the exhaust gets cut open, some removal/modification of the internal baffles is done, and then it's put back together. No outward signs of modification, but a supposedly freer flowing and definitely better sounding and only slightly louder exhaust is the result. Sounds perfect, so I snapped that up and it sat in the corner of the basement until I had the time and motivation to work on it.
Now...the problem. Porsche is generally really good at corrosion resistance as I think most people know. But...apparently nobody told the exhaust group that. This car spent the first half of its life in the northeast, and while most of the car held up nearly flawlessly, the exhaust seriously suffered. That would be the source of the various small muffler leaks that initialed all of this. So this job wasn't going to be as simple as just "unbolt, remove, reinstall". The mount hardware was in good shape, the only rusty bolts that needed to be dealt with - while on the car at least - were the four studs and nuts in the flange at the exit of the catalytic converters. At first glance those actually looked like they were in okay enough shape that they might come apart normally And in fact the thread interface was still okay, but the nuts themselves and the exposed stud threads were rusting away from the outside so getting any traction on the nuts was a challenge. Add to that the fact that the flanges are in an awful location to access - stuffed in between the strut, knuckle, axle, and control arm - and things get extra interesting. One nut I managed to hammer a one size too small socket onto and break loose. Another, the universe had already removed for me in one way or another, which was nice...of course that was also probably contributing to the exhaust leak. The final two, which of course were the "inner" nut on either side and therefore the hardest to access, were just not going to be removed normally. The best I could come up with was to break out the reciprocating multitool and dig up a narrow metal cutting blade, and slice up the nuts until the remains were able to be hammered off of the studs. That took a lot of effort but eventually panned out and I was able to release the assembly.
I had originally intended to reuse those exhaust tips (the "new" muffler didn't include one), so then I had to separate the two mufflers. Happily, now out of the car with good access and not needing to reuse any of this stuff, I could use much more brute force in dealing with the fasteners. The clamp bolts on the exhaust tip were actually still intact enough that they just broke loose with an impact, one crossover bolt snapped immediately with impact application, and the other actually came loose. Somewhat visible in the above photo, there's a clamp on either pipe that attaches that mount bracket. Those bolts didn't look that bad but didn't respond to the impact, so the clamps just got cut off. This is the hardware carnage, along with the pile of rust that resulted from knocking the two mufflers apart:
With the mufflers out, the last challenge was to extract the studs from the catalytic converter flanges so that they could be replaced with non-rusted and/or sliced up hardware. That actually went surprisingly well with just a cheap tie rod removal press and some creative spacers. As you can see in the photo above, one of the studs actually ripped the mounting base off of the flange rather than pressing out of it. The replacement hardware is actually bolts rather than studs, so that didn't cause any issues.
I had originally intended to reuse the stock exhaust tip, but the more I looked at it, it was just more rough than I really wanted. And it cleans up decently but seems to return to looking awful almost immediately with use. Conveniently, I came agross another ebay find of a relatively cheap takeoff GT4/sport exhaust tip, basically the same part but with a black finish instead of chrome, and in much better condition. I didn't love the black finish at first, but I figured worst case it's going to turn black anyway, at least the difference won't be as noticeable. But now that I have it and have seen it on the car, I really like the look. It's not as deep black is it seemed, in the installed photos below it actually looks almost like normal chrome, though it's definitely a bit darker than that in person.
"New" parts loosely assembled and ready to install:
There's way too many degrees of freedom in this assembly, so getting it all aligned correctly once up in the car took some effort, but eventually worked out. Replacing the studs with bolts made the initial installation process much easier I think.
And installed, on a very dirty car because I didn't get the chance to wash it before parking it:
There was a quick break in the weather after some rain where the roads were clear, I used that as motivation to get this finished so that I could hear what it sounds like without having to wait another month. And yeah it's definitely a big improvement. Maybe not quite as aggressive as I hoped but definitely much better sounding expecially at high throttle/high rpm, and barely any louder than stock in normal driving conditions. Cruising on the highway it's a bit louder, but not drone-y, just a bit higher volume. So all in all a total win I'd say. As an added bonus, now when it eventually needs a clutch I shouldn't have to spend a week just dealing with removing the exhaust.
So now it's back to sitting in the garage waiting for the next break in the weather to get some driving time in. I think this summer's experience is going to motivate me to drive it a lot more this summer, ideally basically any time that doesn't involve bike (or other large item) hauling duties.