All posts tagged engine

Replacing Air and Cabin Filter on the Boxster

Since buying the Porsche Boxster S, I had driven it for at least a 1000 miles in the last 2 years. However, I had never changed the air filter or the cabin filter. The Boxster was sitting for a few weeks in a dusty area in Texas before I got it, so I decided to do this change and reduce the smelliness in the cabin as well.

This is one of the easier changes to do in the Boxster and requires no tools. I recommend purchasing the Hengst Air Filter E458L (Figure 14) and Hengst Cabin Filter E951LC (Figure 17) for this task. These are the OEM filters that Porsche uses on the 986 model cars and it is best to stick to OEM versions for a perfect fit.

Changing the Valve Cover Gasket

The Miata’s engine has an easy to change Valve Cover Gasket, which I chose to replce because I saw some potential oil leak at the bottom of the car. I asked on reddit and the users said that it was probably a bad valve cover gasket and should be replaced, which is what I ended up doing. I am not sure if that has fixed the problem yet but will keep checking. It is quite an easy fix.

Spark Plugs and Plug Wire Replacement

One of the relatively easy improvements to your engine’s performance besides an oil change is to replace the spark plugs and the plug wires which is what I did today.

The recommended spark plugs for the NB Miata are the NGK Iridium IX plugs as seen in Figure 1. I also decided to replace the plug wires with NGK blue plug wires, both of which I purchased from Rockauto.com.

For the 1999 NB Miata, which has a 4-cylinder engine we need 4 spark plugs (Figure 2).