Wow that's a lot of metal. WAY more than I found.
I wanted to post a quick update, since I haven't posted up in a while. I went on a motorcycle trip with my oldest son and then I had to do the transmission valve body in our Touareg. It's been many years since I did work on an automatic. It reminds me of camping on the beach, where you find sand in your a** crack and every other place for weeks.
That's complete now, so I'm able to get back to my Porsche. Last night after regrouping my tools and cleaning up I dropped my oil pan.
Not a single chip of metal. There was the tiniest of gray stains built up near the base of the baffle but not enough to even get under a fingernail. I expected it to look like a metal version of Don King's hair. Instead it would appear that my oil filter performed as intended and/or my timing was impeccable.
I did a bunch more reading on various paths I can take with my IMS. The short version is that I feel like it would be dumb to not pull the IMS cover and replace it just because I'm in there.
I did determine that my engine is a double row IMS, not single as previously discussed. Staring at a picture last night on Pelican, I finally noticed the part numbers on the face of the IMS cover and compared mine to this pic on the Pelican site:
My part number ends in 1702, so it would appear that I'm indeed double row.