8 months and 7 days later and I have my car back! I drove from NJ up to Mt. Tremblant last July 5th, for a PCA NE-NNJR HPDE at Mt. Tremblant. The next morning, as I was about to leave the hotel for the first day at the track, my car sounded like a washing machine full of rocks running with no water in it. I was lucky enough to get my car towed back to NJ by another club member who let me drive his 997 GT3 home that he had trailered up to Mt. Tremblant.
My shop performed a leakdown test on the engine before removal and disassembly and it had great results. Teardown revealed that the IMSB had failed with minimal collateral damage to the rest of the engine. The IMSB was an LN single row pro that was installed by my shop at about 42,000 miles. In earlier posts about this I may have said my car was up to 68,000 miles, which was a definite senior moment on my part, as my car had 77,000 miles at the time of IMSB failure.
After looking at used engine options, and having missed out on the RND closeout sale of rebuilt M96 engines, I decided to have my shop rebuild my engine. In addition to the usual new parts and rebuild items of bearings, gaskets, timing chains, valve job, crank polishing, etc, I needed a new timing chain paddle to replace one that broke on the flywheel end of the engine, a new oil pump due to gouging of the inner surface and a new IMS. Other new parts were a new oil cooler and new lifters as there was no way to determine if there was any debris inside. Perhaps the oil cooler could have been flushed, but a new one was less than $200.
Since I was going this far, I decided to get the LN 3.6 Nickies too. This took the bulk of the time to get my engine rebuilt, over 4 months. LN uses a plater that is in very high demand and that plater has a huge backlog of work - auto engines, motorcycle engines and snowmobile engines. So I guess they have no off season.
Other upgrades include the IMS Solution this time around, ARP rod bolts, Fabspeed headers with catalysts, a 987 airbox with a 987 MAF, a Softronics tune, low temperature thermostat and housing, a new 987 motor mount and Function First "Sport" motor mount and transmission mount stiffeners.
My car already had an underdrive pulley and a MantisSport deep sump, and those are on the new engine.
The engine has to be broken in, and even though I need to take it easy for 1,500 miles, it pulls very nicely in 6th gear at 70 mph, I can feel it has more power. The exhaust note with the headers and the rest of the stock exhaust sounds nice - a little more aggressive and deeper, but still pretty tame.
After the break-in, the car will go on the dyno to verify the tune and perhaps do some tweaking to it. It will be interesting to see what the HP and torque numbers are compared to published stock for a 2003 3.2.
