To say that the job was a pig is a bit of an understatement. I decided to be ultra safe and put the car on axles stands. This necessitates jacking up the car under the engine. But before you can do this it's necessary to remove the undertray to ensure you don't put the jack through an oil pipe. With very little ground clearance under a porsche it's a very frustrating and time consuming job. With that done the car could be jacked up and then dropped onto the stands:
Getting badly corroded discs off is no piece of cake either especially when the handbrake shoes are binding on the inside of the disc hub because they hadn't been adjusted properly in their previous life! However once off, I gave the wheel hub and the calipers a good cleaning and adjusted the handbrake shoes so that they had a nice clearance. This meant that the new discs slid on very nicely. The new discs are the Sebro version which come already painted in grey primer. I sprayed the hat rims with high temperature black paint but left the face of the hat grey as it is hidden by the wheel.
The final pain in the ass is the need to grind down the sides of the new brake pads - over time the corrosion in the calipers 'lifts' the spring plates so new pads stick in the calipers. Changing the spring plates is a very frustrating job and can be very expensive if you get it wrong so the general consensus is to just adjust the pads so they fit.
Since I had the car on stands I finished the weekend off by fitting a rear bumper support bar (they rust away over time) and I took the opportunity to wash down the underside of the engine to clean away some of the old oil. If you're worried about the RMS leaking on a boxster, don't bother with a 964 - they are notorious for leaking oil. In my case most of the oil was clearly old from previous leaks that had been fixed. I thought I'd clean them away to make it easy spot any new ones when they occur.
p.s. Discs, pads and sensors came to a shade over £150.
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