I have a theory on the IMS failure

[landrovered]

I am smelling a wives tale in the making.

You need data, scientific data to analyze and then you need to test a theory in reality to see if the hypothesis is correct.

The only person that seems to be doing that is Jake. As much as I disagree with his marketing approach and fear mongering he is approaching it from a scientific standpoint and I applaud him for that.

What was interesting to me were the comments that he made recently about abusing the Boxster motor intentionally to blow it up and cause failure. All of the things he was doing were like fingernails on the chalkboard to me, reving a cold engine, banging on the limiter in first gear, the list was long. Reading it was aweful. Last I heard he had not blown it up yet.

The point is that you can have as many Eureka moments as you want but without research, data and experimentation you may as well make sacrifices to a head of cabbage, it will be just as effective as this speculation.

Not trying to piss anyone off but I felt the need to say something here.

[jacabean]

I personally do not think there is any particular reason for these failures other than poor design of this area. I believe if you are going to get a failure it will not have anything to do with the way you drive or oil types or change intervals. Basically, if it's going to happen it's gonna happen regardless of what you do.
You guys need to understand that there are tens of thousands of boxsters out there. thousands of which will never see this problem. Roll the dice , that is how i look at it. the odds are in your favor.
Do i believe this is a problem? Yes! there is no excuse for the amount of failures that have been happening for a car that cost as much as they do. 911 owners paying over a 100 grand for a car that blows up! these cars should run to 200k for what they cost.

If your not hitting the rev. limiter every know and then you should'nt own a porsche sports car!

Just my 2cents

[Quickurt]

Sometimes we Krauts live up to our hard-headed reputations.
Long, long ago, in a galaxy not too far away, Porsche made a 1300 CC 356 engine with roller bearing main bearings. Great little motor.....until you "lugged" it one time and Kaput! the roller bearings self destructed within short order. For those who don't understand the term "lugged" it is what happens when you drop the RPM too low in gear and then try to accelerate away. It's a nasty sound and a really nasty vibration that does terrible things to your crankshaft, bearings, connecting rods and pistons.
In any case, Porsche went back to plain main bearings and the problem went away with the change. So..................can someone explain why Porsche would put more roller or ball bearings inside the engine????
The only explanation I can come up with is the distance the intermediate shaft is from other pressure lubed rotating shafts and they are saving the porting/runners/tubing to get pressure oil to it?

[roadracer311]

I've thought for a while now that lugging the motor probably contributes to the RMS failures. Explains why the tips fail less often (the production numbers for tips are higher than you might think, or at least they were prior to 2007 when I was researching to buy mine.) So it was interesting to see some history (from Quickurt) of lugging a motor leading to roller bearing failure.

It would be interesting to know if Porsches in countries with higher octane fuel also have the same level of RMS failures. Lugging can also cause pinging (even with a car designed to tune on the fly to eliminate pinging). Pinging can send all sorts of forces and vibrations through a car

[Jake Raby]

You need data, scientific data to analyze and then you need to test a theory in reality to see if the hypothesis is correct.

Correct. that data needs to be gathered with as few variables as possible.

The only person that seems to be doing that is Jake.

Thats because all I do is basically gather data and perform tests. I first did this with aircooled Porsches, then moved to the M96.

As much as I disagree with his marketing approach and fear mongering he is approaching it from a scientific standpoint and I applaud him for that.

I invite ANY of you to come to my office for a day, sit between Dean and I and listen to the phone calls; I'll even let you read our emails. When you do this you will see that what I have stated isn't fear mongering, it is plain and simply the truth. It is impossible to share the experiences that we face daily with these engines and the results not to be negative. The reason for this is the fact that people seldom call on us before their engine fails or before they have a bad experience, we are much like morticians.

Trust me, if I was willing to put up with the bull**************** related to sharing EVERYTHING that we see here the term fear monger would be an understatement. I quit posting on forums because I had nothing good to offer, there are no fairy tells here. I even quit adding the details related to the modes of failure to my site because people couldn't handle the truth and because I don't have the talent to bull**************** anyone into reading about a "good" failure mode with these engines.

We deal with carnage daily that ranges from intermix, cracked heads, IMS failures and the like because thats what we do and we are the only real specialists in the US that go this deeply into the engine. Aside from the wise people that schedule a preventive IMS procedure with us or the people who want big power from a new FSI engine, EVERYTHING else we deal with is the direct result of a catastrophic or near catastrophic failure. There are always those cases related to things that no one else can diagnose or repair. We do not do service work, we do not complete tune ups, but we do disassemble some really mangled parts and pick up lots of pieces. We don't work on any other aspect of the car other than the engine.

Like I said, we are M96 Morticians, we get the death calls and we hear the sob stories and I even have recordings of owners CRYING when they left us voicemails after an engine death. Like I said, I don't have to make this sound worse than it is to get business, hell I had to STOP talking about it to keep from pissing people off!

Its plain and simple, we are backlogged for months because we took the time several years ago to understand this beast and tame it. We also took the initiative when others called us idiots to develop the upgrades for the engine and because of that this economy hasn't hurt us at all. We have more business than we can handle so don't ever think that I am making things sound worse in hopes of gaining business, in fact we are turning work down and have been for two years off and on.

What was interesting to me were the comments that he made recently about abusing the Boxster motor intentionally to blow it up and cause failure. All of the things he was doing were like fingernails on the chalkboard to me, reving a cold engine, banging on the limiter in first gear, the list was long. Reading it was aweful. Last I heard he had not blown it up yet.

It still hasn't blown up. It'll soon be seeing service in the most demanding application possible. To me engines are tools, and I push their buttons to find what makes them tick and ultimately what makes them go boom. What I learned from treating that engine horribly is something I'll never share, because no one would believe it.

The point is that you can have as many Eureka moments as you want but without research, data and experimentation you may as well make sacrifices to a head of cabbage, it will be just as effective as this speculation

I agree.

Charles from LN and I have some really good hunches as to what actually creates the IMS issues, but I'd never post that here or anywhere else. I told a writer from a prominent publication that I refused to divulge the information, even though he was willing to PAY me for the interview (THIS WAS NOT EXCELLENCE!).

I have often wondered what would happen if I started a twitter account and posted every phone call we receive related to a failure and every email that we receive on the same topic as soon as they occur... I guarantee I'd be called everything under the sun by the 3rd day we created the account. Trust me, what I have shared isn't anywhere near what I can share.

What matters is we have repairs and preventives for the majority of the 20 different modes of failure, people seem to overlook the good we have done. Thats par for the course and it sucks.

[Steve Tinker]

Only some people overlook the good you have done (& shared) Jake - a lot of others appreciate your work, whether its your bread and butter or not....

[CenterIsl]

Originally Posted by Jake Raby

Like I said, we are M96 Morticians, we get the death calls and we hear the sob stories and I even have recordings of owners CRYING when they left us voicemails after an engine death.

Interesting analogy. Morticians presumably get calls when people are dead or dying in the forseeable future. But while a mortician can reasonably tabulate the causes of death that he sees, an actuary would be the right person to ask about your chances of dying.

In our world, the automobile actuaries are Porsche (though they don't share their results, you can perhaps infer from their actions), Consumer Reports, JD Powers, and so on. As far as I have been able to determine, not one of them has tabulated greater than "average" major engine failures on M96-engine Porsches.

[Jake Raby]

Exactly.. Thats why when I am asked how long an engine will live I reply "How long will you live?" In a mechanical world nothing can be accurately forecast for a life span, hell not even the weather man can make an accurate forecast these days!