Blown engine. This sucks!

[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).