Frankenboxster takes a tip from the "ev" world! yes - we now have electric steering

  but first let's talk about the stinky stuff!

Apparently some critter managed to make a home is the cabin air filter assembly

 BACK to the conversion to Electrically Powered steering... this just keeps getting tougher:-(

Space is so limited with the LS3 going into the FrankenBoxster that both the power steering pump and the water pump have to go! - there is no physical space left in the engine bay to put these guys in - much less get a drive belt to them.

So.... what can we do?  Convert it to ELECTRIC!

There is actually a kit out there (that is mega-bucks!) to convert to electric, but I chose to take a tip from the EV world. There is a big community of folks that love to take cars and convert them to electric vehicles (EV). My brother Fred has done 3 cars to date; an Austin Healey Bug-eye, a MGTD replicar, and he's just finished a Porsche 944.  The hot ticket in the EV world is to take the electric power steering assembly from the last Toyota MR2 series and use it as the basis to fabricate and adapt to your own application. As you'll see in the photos, it is all combined into one reasonably sized unit - pump, controller, reservoir and rubber isolation mounts.  The controller electronics allow input from the vehicle's TSS sensor to vary the pressure the system generates to ensure consistent steering feel and to reduce the current drawn by the unit at higher vehicle speed.  

Fabricate mounts, fabricate hoses and wire it up!
Actually it's a lot tougher than the previous sentence sounds - I really wanted to mount mine in a way that did not drastically  reduce the front trunk's capacity much... the worst part of the whole job was getting at the Porsche rack and then getting the hoses disconnected (really tight/little access). Of course you also need to drill holes and route the hoses to the pumps location. The Boxster hoses that came out were about 8 feet long, FrankenBoxster's hoses are now about 2 feet long:-)


Here's the first fitting - used one existing mounting stud and then welded the others into place

Spun the reservoir around so the return line could be routed next to the pressure line

Here's some finished photos - it's hard to see but note where the lines are routed - really tried to keep the hose length to a minimum and endeavored to make it look as stock as possible - like Porsche meant to put it there! (and keep as much trunk space a possible)

So one electric pump down, one to go!
Stayed tuned for our next blog - water pump!