[Jake Raby]

Yowzers! Great write-up Jake, even I could understand that. And the pictures, wow, what carnage. Pictures are not just worth thousands of words but dollars too!

Thanks!
I tried to leave all the techno-babble out as much as possible and post at a comprehension level that those who haven't been inside this engine could understand.

It kind of hard to eye ball the thickness difference of the tensioners but I guess there is.

Its a minute difference, but it does exist. Its so small that I had overlooked it until this instance.

I one thing I did see was the pot metal at the break.

The whole part is "pot metal" and crappy.

Those tensioners must be put under a tremendous amount of stress (I think of watching a motorcycle chain under power and then letting off) and to use crap metal is crazy.

Unreal tension, especially when the vario cam comes in and everything in the top end of the engine tightens up.

So Jake, you think this could be the cause of some of the failures?

Absolutely.It already has failed in this engine and I am sure it's not the first, but its the first time we have seen it.

Because of the carnage in a block after one lets loose that it simply is being overlooked and the blame is put on the IMS?

The symptoms are exactly the same as an IMS failure, thats why it fooled everyone that had diagnosed it, even me.

Without TOTAL disassembly this would be misdiagnosed as an IMS failure. Since a majority of the engines are sent to Porsche for reman without ever being opened up, everyone **THINKS** that they had an IMS failure, when it really wasn't.

If thats the case the fix seems so much easier to remedy.

NO!!! It's not! To uncover this tensioner the ENTIE engine must be torn down, if you notice the tensioner attaches to the crank carrier, the first assembly installed into the engine when building it and the last assembly removed at tear down. There is no way to apply our updated part without removing every bolt from the engine, unfortunately.

We are doing a metallurgical survey on the broken part to see what it's comprised of, so we can look for the traces of this material when we pull oil samples from customer's engines orfor those who are part of our oil monitoring program. This will help diagnose issues before they occur.

Is this a part that an average joe with average joe tools can replace on his own?

With one of our engine assembly kits of updated components and our tools it could be done by following the DVD we are working on now... Otherwise this is a near impossible level of repair for a DIY project.

We klearn something new everyday...