87Woodcab

Has anyone diagnosed a bad front cooling fan, and then replaced it? Could you please give me ideas for doing both? I have an 06 911S. ThanX

slicky rick

Should not be hard. I havent done this nut i will still share my thoughts...if you do not mind. Me thinks remove front bumper, you will now see the rads in full view. The fans are behind the rads ...it should be an easy task after that. But these things last, might be best to check if current isgoing into them before proceeding to remove. If not you can always find a 12 volt power supply and try pushing current into the fans just to check if working or not, if that is possible.

Spiffyjiff

even easier with a durametric if you know someone who has - you can turn them on/off at will. that's how i figured out that the body shop forgot to reconnect my right fan.

StormRune

Don't know if this is the case for you or not:
When the right front fan failed on my 2006, the only way I knew that it had failed was that the left front fan would come on at full blast instead of its normal variable behavior. It was a very noticeable roar and you could feel strong airflow coming out of the front of the front wheel well where the air exits. According the the service people, the fan opposite to the failed one does this when a failure is detected as a fail-safe to compensate for the loss of cooling.

However, it turned out in my case the fan was fine, the failure was in the controller for the fan. They left the original fan in and replaced the control module. I'm not sure if there is a code that helps to determine which has failed, the fan or the controller, but it may be worth checking if you can get access to a code reader.

As SpiffyJiff noted, a Durametric Pro can turn on each side individually to help with testing (headlights individually too BTW!), although I'm still not sure if that would isolate that for you.

My only thought is that since in my case with the controller failure the system knew about it and turned the other one on full power, if yours is not doing this then maybe it is not the controller and more likely the fan. This is just a guess though.

I know others on the forums have also had fan failures that only turned out to be debris jamming the fan. They removed the debris and everything worked fine again.

spender

I replaced both of these in my 996 C4S just a few months ago, and can offer some advice for sure. Yes, I know the structure of the cars is slightly different, but I would imagine it's pretty close.

Here are some useful links I found (yes, they are to Renntech, hope that's okay mods!) when I did mine - I had to replace one fan completely, and on the other one had to change the big ballast resistor.

Fan diagnosis: http://www.renntech.org/forums/topic.../?fromsearch=1

How to jump the relay: http://986forum.com/forums/general-d...d-working.html

http://www.renntech.org/forums/topic...eded-please-0/

http://www.pelicanparts.com/techarti...eplacement.htm

Good luck! Post any questions you have or PM me, and will be very happy to help if I can.

87Woodcab

These forums are wonderful. Thanks to all the Porsche lovers who are willing to share their expertise.

onewhippedpuppy

Durametric is the easy way, but if you engage your A/C it should activate the fans on low. Even on low you can feel the air moving up front, as well as hear the fans hum.

I had a 986 that I bought with both fans not working, they both ended up needing replaced. It's not a hard project just somewhat tedious. On the upside, it's a great opportunity to clean your radiators.