Blown engine. This sucks!

[Swhitcomb]

Well, the 14.5 gets me a rebuilt by Porsche engine with a 3 year 36000 mile warranty. I had the shop order it. Just very dismayed. Partially by the short lived engine, and more so by the fact that I can't do it myself. I've built lots of VW aircooled engines. I hate that the boxster is so unserviceable.

[Deserion]

Originally Posted by Swhitcomb

Well, the 14.5 gets me a rebuilt by Porsche engine with a 3 year 36000 mile warranty. I had the shop order it. Just very dismayed. Partially by the short lived engine, and more so by the fact that I can't do it myself. I've built lots of VW aircooled engines. I hate that the boxster is so unserviceable.

Reman engine through Porsche won't have the LN IMS bearing. Best option may be to get a good used engine, do the LN IMS retrofit, RMS, AOS, and other easily-accessible-while-out parts and save about 8-10k.

[flaps10]

Originally Posted by Swhitcomb

[snip]
Partially by the short lived engine, and more so by the fact that I can't do it myself. I've built lots of VW aircooled engines. I hate that the boxster is so unserviceable.

First, I feel for your pain and the expense you're going through.

As a guy who built his own air cooled VW engines I feel there are way more similarities than most Porsche fanatics would care to admit.

I looked through the engine build sequence on flatsix's page and was impressed with the design differences (the crank running in a bearing carrier instead of right on the case halves), but in the end it's a horizontally opposed engine with two more cylinders and the cams (plural thank you) out where they belong. You just have to move the expected prices over one decimal point.

You can buy a 9-year old $70,000 car for the price of a new Kia - but the day it needs to go in the shop it's still a $70,000 car.

That is the truth right there.

The VW engines I built were hopped up and you had to be just as meticulous as Jake discusses on his 986 build or you were just throwing your money away. If you slap a type 1 together you will get what you deserve in short order.

Engine comes out from underneath just like a bug. There isn't tons of reach from the top but there isn't much to be done up there anyway. There is access from the front side which no air cooled VW had, and pretty much everything else it comes down getting at it from underneath.

As for the rest of the car outside of the longblock, I'm finding it to not be any more exotic or difficult to work on than any other car I've owned (and I've owned plenty of cars and worked on them all).

[Lobo1186]

Originally Posted by Swhitcomb

Well, the 14.5 gets me a rebuilt by Porsche engine with a 3 year 36000 mile warranty. I had the shop order it. Just very dismayed. Partially by the short lived engine, and more so by the fact that I can't do it myself. I've built lots of VW aircooled engines. I hate that the boxster is so unserviceable.

14.5K gets you another 02 base. IDK that price seems pretty steep.

[Coaster]

Originally Posted by Lobo1186

14.5K gets you another 02 base. IDK that price seems pretty steep.

I got my 03 S for just a little more than that too.

[Jake Raby]

Sops never became proficient with these engines because they were too cheap to replace in the old days.. That is, except for us. Thats why we are where we are, because of foresight and forethought, coupled to pioneering the components and assembly before we "needed" to. Today I have done the same thing with the 9a1 engine family.

All that said, a blown engine and a broken engine are two different things. To someone thats not proficient with the engine internally, they'd rather do brake jobs and oil changes than to tear into your engine. Why? Because there's more money in it and the car leaves the same day, and there's less liability. I don't know what its like for a car to arrive and drive the same day- everything we see is broken. Broken badly and typically given up on by everyone thats touched it before.

West Virginia is what we call "local" shipping. I have cars here from California, and Vancouver Canada as well as about 28 more places across N. America.

Yes, I always bring the real news. Call it doom and gloom, or call it reality. Most modern humans can't handle the truth. They don't want to hear that everything mechanical will fail at some point, unless it wears out first.

We have two sides of the house here at Flat 6, we don't just carry out or reconstructions, but we also do these types of repairs on lower mileage engines that prove themselves to be solid candidates for repair. Not everything has a good prognosis, but you have to give it a shot before just buying something else.