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Originally Posted by stephen wilson
If you want to see exactly what's involed, and judge for yourself, check out the Pelicanparts.com forum . In the "Tech info center" they have a very detailed pictoral of a complete engine tear-down, which shows the bearing replacement steps, as does LN's website.
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OK, I stand corrected, at least partially. I checked out the removal/installation procedure on pelicanparts.com. Looks like a piece of cake. :-) Seriously, it doesn't look too bad. It's also detailed just as well on flat6innovations.com. I saw some of it first hand when my car was being done.
I've never had any contact w/LN Engineering, although I've seen Charles Navarro's posts and seen their site before, but not recently. As you said, they're selling the single and double row bearings & renting the puller. They're in business to make $. If they're OK with selling the bearing to anyone, who can fault them?
Maybe I misunderstood Jake; he may have said HE wasn't selling the bearing, only installing it and training/certifying other people to do it.
AFAIK, LNE only develops, manufactures and sells parts and doesn't get involved with installations in customer cars or training. The latter is Jake's bailiwick. If your bearing hasn't yet failed, it does seem an experienced mechanic or DIYer could handle the retrofit. If the engine has failed and there's a question as to whether the IMS bearing was the sole cause or a contributing factor, that's where things can get a lot more complicated and intimate knowledge of this engine and all of its "modes of failure" - to use Jake's term - becomes much more valuable.
From what he told me, there's a real lack of M96 rebuilding knowledge out there among experienced mechanics, particularly dealer mechanics, because Porsche only wanted to sell and swap complete engines. As the value of cars with this engine has dropped, mileage is racked up, warranties end, and Porsche jacks the prices of its remanufactured engines way up, the demand for rebuilding and repair has increased. Jake told me he loves to share his knowledge and teach, so much so that his new shop building has a dedicated classroom that includes pro level equipment for producing instructional videos. (Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking. Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more. ;-) ) There are thousands of candidates for the retrofit out there and even if he did them full time he'd only be able to do a very small percentage of them (all his words). Why not do what he loves and share his knowledge through training? And so he does.
I didn't see any evidence that he has any shortage of business or is trying to keep all the IMSR business for himself. People ship cars to him from all over the country, and engines from all over the world, so I think this means something about what he offers. When I was there a 986 from CA with a failed engine was shipped in, an engine was being sent out to Russia that had been shipped in for an IMS retrofit (maybe other stuff as well), and he was rebuilding a $30k race engine for a GT3. I had to make my appointment 2 months in advance.
So what's my point? Forget a minute about the guys who are skilled enough to do this job themselves (more power to them). As someone who had to pay for this retrofit to be done, I felt much more comfortable taking my car to a guy who knows the procedure (he'd done around 20 of them at that time), the product and the engine inside and out. I wasn't anxious to have even a very talented local mechanic learn/train on my car, labor cost issues aside. Having the benefit of Jake's expertise didn't cost me any more than if I'd attempted to have the job done locally. My clutch was done at the same time, as was the RMS. Subtracting what these would have cost me locally (parts & labor) and the cost of the bearing & puller rental - if I were to attempt this job myself (ha!) - and the net labor cost to have him do the IMSR was ~$1,000. For the level of expertise and the quality of the result I got, that's a great value in my book. All things to think about if DIY isn't an option.
The person who can do the bearing can also undoubtedly do his clutch and the RMS. For such a highly skilled person, now the cost for Jake to do the job is more like $2000-$2500, probably not worth it.
Hybrid Mode
