[BYprodriver]

Originally Posted by thstone

The following is from the LN Engineering website. You can deicde for yourself if LN is saying that their bearing is a permanent replacement or not.

That said, we've put the best bearings we can in our IMS Retrofit™ Kits and IMS Upgrades to give your M96 the best fighting chance for a long service life. However, with any mechanical system, we do expect there to be failures. With thousands IMS Upgrade and IMS Retrofit™ bearings in service, we have experienced zero failures of intermediate shafts with our triple bearing IMS Upgrade and similarly zero failures of the dual row bearing IMS Retrofit™s. However, of all three revisions of the intermediate shaft used by Porsche, the single row bearing found on some 2000-2001 and all 2002-2005 models is the most flawed and even with our ceramic bearing, we have had five engine failures total where the single row ceramic bearing was found to have failed (although not conclusively as the cause of the engine failure, given there are dozens of known modes of failure and secondly, these are open bearings susceptible to damage from foreign object debris). Even so, we have over a 99.9% success rate in the 3+ years our bearings have been in service.

It may be advisable to consider the IMS a service item, like a timing belt in many modern cars. Seeing that we started to see more MY05 engines with IMS failures in late 2009 as well as failures in MY06 (with revised 3rd gen bearing) in late 2010, that may suggest that bearing replacement (or inspection at bare minimum) should be considered as part of the normal maintenance every 4-5 years or 50-60k miles, maybe even sooner with the case of the single row bearing.

LN Knows better than to claim the LN IMSB is a permanent solution, but that in no way diminishes the quality of the part.