Well, been putting this off for a while. What seems like a super easy thing to do, turned into a royal PITA. Decided to repaint the seat adjustment covers. Now, on "normal cars", this would be a simple thing of removing the knobs and popping off the panel, painting, and reattaching, but NOOooOOoOOo... Not with Porsche! They design everything to be overly complicated and almost impossible to service. But that's no surprise to you, right? We're not talking a cracked block or IMS replacement here for goodness sakes, just a simple plastic plate! But Porsche chose to design their seat electronics to install easily ONCE... and that's at the factory, not after the fact. Removing the knobs and the two screws and pulling the plate off is simple, but the electronics are attached to the plate with virtually NO slack in the cables... therefore, realigning the knobs and reattaching the plate is super frustrating. Something simple like attaching the knobs became a 1 hr. job. Porsche (or whoever engineered this thing) put little springs in the knobs that have to be perfectly aligned or the knob WON'T work. Also, those darn springs tend to pop off and launch themselves within a radius of 100 yards around the car.... finding them is about as difficult as trying to locate Jimmy Hoffa's body. Where is Geraldo when I need him?!!! Anyway, long story short, I removed the plates, sanded them down, and repainted them flat black. I didn't want to repaint them graphic grey, because frankly, I like the interior look of the Mk1 996 cars before Porsche thought it was a good idea to paint everything the same color.
As you can see from the image, the rubberized graphite grey paint is scratched off. You'd think that Porsche would have learned from their mistakes, but the gummed up paint problem trickled over onto the 997 unfortunately. Look up 997 radio knob problem and you'll get plenty to read.
The plates after sanding...
Here's a shot before I started to cuss like a sailor. For some reason, the driver side was a little easier because it didn't have the amount of wires soldered to the board, but the passenger side was where the problems began. Didn't have enough length to get my hand around the back to snap the circuit board back onto the plate. It's kept popping off when I tried to reattach the knobs.
Finally, got the repainted plates installed and seat checked out.
*word to the wise, to avoid shorting these board out, remove both seat fuses. I can't imagine what Porsche charges for both of this units.
