Quote:
Originally Posted by porsche-land
People pay you $700 for a bearing that costs you $100 to make....
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Can I offer you some unsolicited feedback? This is not a good point to make in the US or Europe. First of all $650 -$700 is not a lot of money for the critical job that is done by this part even if it has to be replaced at an interval. It will cost a lot more than $700 to fix any engine damage because there where short cuts to bring the cost down to $100 or whatever. Secondly, a Porsche owner by and large is a fairly sophisticated consumer and understands that the cost of materials and manufacture is not the only cost. Take for instance the number of educated people who use iPhones. These phones do not cost anywhere near $700 to manufacture but few are saying "F U Apple those guys are ripping us off!! I'm going to buy an Oppo Find 7 or One Plus One for half the price that uses even better hardware". The sophisticated consumer knows that they are buying from a seller in Apple (or Samsung) that has a large knowledge base and have substantial resources to deal with with warranty issues or any other problems that arise. Thirdly, the LNE bearing has a proven track record so in this world that affords a seller the ability to set a price that the market will accept. I'm probably the longest regular poster on this forum (10 years this month). Since the LNE bearing has come out and thousands of retrofits performed I still couldn't point you to one complaint on this forum on any of the other popular Porsche forums. And unlike most aftermarket sellers and devs these guys regularly provide useful information on this subject and the many other ways an m96/7 can fail. This is something important in this era of internet forums for sports cars. Most often is someone has an issue, however trivial, right away some pissed off forum member goes right onto a car forum to start getting back their pound of flesh from the aftermarket seller. Yet this is virtually unheard of for the LNE bearings even after this many retrofits.
So all this taken together, I don't think you're going to find too many people complaining about a $700 part that frees you from the chore and expense of having to remove an engine just to service this one part. I assume Jake Raby and Charles Navarro had a lot to with sparing us all that expense and providing our indys the tools to do these retrofits locally which might be the first time I can think of such a thing ever happening that even the factory making the engines didn't bother to provide at their service shops.