[JoeFromPA]

Reading these things makes everyone who owns one worry. On my legacy GT, if you go to the main forum for those cars there are starting to be threads saying,

"I have 80k on my stock turbo and it's not blown yet. What am I doing wrong?"

It became a joke at how many armageddon threads were started vs. actual failures compared to the total production run.

I am not a Jake Raby, nor am I an expert by any means on the 986. I will say however that I received a message on another forum from someone, umm, involved in this arena. Here's what I can share:

"The IMS typically fails due to the failure of a drive sprocket retaining stud. This causes the collapse of a bearing which may be heard as a "death rattle" prior to prompt failure. Many reasons have been advanced from the drive chain type (non Duplex) to misalignment of the engine/gearbox to simply a flexing crankshaft caused by through-bolt design inadequacy. My guess is that it is a matrix of all of these things and some others. The failure rate in Pre MY2005 engines with Tiptronic may be as low as one in 20000. This quite a low rate in such a low volume engine family.

Another reason advanced by some people with extensive Technical experience in this area is that lubricants that are too viscous (when dead cold) may contibute to the problem until they become less viscous, especially in engines that are used very infrequently."


Take it for what it's worth. I'm not willing to source that without express permission, so it's a unsourced reference on an internet forum. hehehe.

I mean no offense to Jake and those who have had failures, but understand that what they see is failures. People seek Jake out to talk about failures, get recommendations to avoid failures, etc.

To give a similar story from Subaru (again), they have been making Subarus since 1996 with bad oil pick-up tubes. Problem with the brazing. It can break off into your oil pan with no warning and is essentially catastrophic, as the oil pressure warning light comes on at 2 PSI. There's not even a sound, just an engine running without lubrication.

A vendor came out with an over-engineered-to-death pick-up tube and charged a reasonable amount for the product. Basically he had been involved in this for years and years and was helping people with sometimes very built engines avoid a really catastrophic design failing. His estimates put the failure at 2-3% of the entire engine production.

I have no idea what it is in the boxster, and it will really suck if I'm (personally) one of the say 20% who have a failure. But I'm willing to change my oil, listen closely to the engine, and drive the snot out of it for years without worrying because the cost/benefit ratio isn't good enough for me personally.

That's just my .02