Ouch, what a mess! It's good to know Jake has a few more options now when things do fail. $12.5k is expensive, but the 2 week turn around is AWESOME and both the $12.5k and the two week turn are a lot better than what I was looking at when my IMS failed only a year ago.

To put this in some military historical context: " No need to worry, the Japanese will never attack Singapore from the mainland swamps" and "The Germans will never attack through the Ardennes" (twice no less!). Continuing Jake's Marine background, "Hope for the best but prepare for the worst". Do you think we would be better off without Jake's input and SOLUTIONS for these problems? If so why not just ignore his posts instead of the silly attack?

AKL :confused:

What a ridiculous comparison.

No more ridiculous than your completely useless post earlier in this thread.

The point was that if you ignore something because you don't want it to be true or happen, you do it at your own peril. To woof on somebody who is offering a solution or prevention is to be boorish.

AKL ;)

To be able to hear the bearing breaking down it will have to get loud enough to overcome the casing, exhaust noise, etc. There is so much noise going on in that area that until it is toast or 'ticking' you won't hear it. Certainly would be great if it did make a lot of noise before hand!
Chris

Earlier someone mentioned that it must have been heard, look at the damage.

I could be wrong -- but it doesn't take long to create carnage when you have metal on metal.

It is possible that the majority of the damage was caused when the bearings
finally let loose.

I'm hoping that there is a method to see the failure before catastrophe.
However the only way I can see that happening in a realistic fashion
is hope for an audible alert -- and frankly those engines make so much
noise that I doubt you could isolate it consistently.
One other possibility is diligent oil analysis, looking for some tell tale sign.
Again, I'm not sure its the proper canary.

Mike

Did you look at the pictures Jake posted? Before Jake and Charles at L&N got involved the only option was a remanufactured engine or one out of a wreck. Now we have multiple options for repairs in some cases and preventative measures for not that much $, especially if you do it in conjunction with a clutch job. I don't understand why anyone driving an M96 car could have anything negative to say about Jake Raby. He has done much for us all. He may not be cheap, but what is, when it comes to Porsches? Not only that, but he is training independents to do the fixes and designing tools to make it easier.

Just ignore him. He's a noted Jake-basher.

Guys:
Having an opposition is nothing new. I don't expect everyone to agree with us and I expect at least 10% of the following to create banter.

These people don't bother me. I have been doing outside the box things and sharing them since before the internet existed. The funny thing is when I attend events these people never have the intestinal fortitude to look at me eyeball to eyeball and challenge what I state. Not once, not ever and I sure wish they would. Their behavior is typical of a keyboard warrior that knows nothing, has no experience and has NEVER developed a single product for these cars.

I haven't been removed from any forums, a couple aren't worth wasting my time with, so all I do is troll them and save screen captures for a rainy day when they become necessary.

What does matter is people like smshirk who have paid the price of admission for what we create and their expectations have been exceeded. The other things that matter are the engines that we save here on a routine basis through our developments in both components and processes. These people save 10K+ of their hard earned money because of what we have created.

Lets say this: If all of you knew what we know and deal with what we see you'd feel the same way that we do about these bearings requiring elective replacement. I had seven failure calls on Monday alone and as we speak I have Boxsters and 996s inbound from Texas (two from Texas!), Rhode Island, West Virginia, California and Manitoba Canada. Of those only one is coming here electively, the rest are broken.

On top of that we experienced Mode Of Failure #22 with these engines just yesterday. This is another Texas car (996) that featured an exploded valve seat. The engine is dead with 50K miles due to collateral damage related to the valve seat explosion. This means that now we can no longer trust the OEM valve seats, all 24 must be changed when we upgrade our engines.

Here is some more "Doom and Gloom" for the opposition to whine about:
2004 996 3.6 liter engine~

Whats left of the valve seat that was blown into the intake plenum
http://a8.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphot...7_816900_n.jpg

Biggest piece of the valve seat that still existed
http://a1.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphot..._2473962_n.jpg

Mining for gold in the oil filter
http://a8.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphot..._6282734_n.jpg

Whats missing here?? Its blown apart and in the intake and mufflers!
http://a2.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphot..._1394390_n.jpg

This is what its supposed to look like.. The seat is gone!!
http://a4.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphot..._6885672_n.jpg

Here is where the seat fell out, danced against the piston at BDC before it was smashed into 10,000 pieces by the piston when it hit TDC
http://a5.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphot..._4308404_n.jpg

Thats a nice piston
http://a8.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphot...9_501297_n.jpg

This is what we do. This is what we see and what we deal with day after day with people from all over the world. As time and mileage increases we are seeing new failures and different symptoms. If you can't handle the truth, thats fine just go ahead and argue, act pissy or make snide comments.

What you say or do won't change anything, in fact it might even make me take extra time from my day to post MORE pictures of doom and gloom just do get you pissed off. Take shots at me and I'll have a lot of fun ruining YOUR day, because it isn't going to bother me. Hell, I can't believe that no one has made any smart ass statements about or most recent Excellence Ad.


This is all real. Its not made up. We see it because we had the first engine program for these engines in this country and have specialized in creating fixes for the inadequacies of the engine in factory form.

I am not a jerk, at least until people start pushing my buttons and then its time to have fun.

Finally we have created a method of forecasting impending IMS failure prior to a big boom. It will also cause some animosity and drama, but it will also help save engines for those who do not want to electively retrofit their IMS bearing. We are in the process of the trademark and patenting procedures and are aggressively doing these things to get the product on the market ASAP because engines are dying daily that we could save.

whoa! that's major news. can't wait!

We are testing the system now and will be forcing an engine to fail soon to prove it's effectiveness.

Jake, more details please

:eek:

Man, to have such an interesting job ...

Its not a job. The first time I leave the house at 0430 and tell my Wife that I'll see her after "work" its time to close the doors. This is a life, 24-7/365 and I love it.. Have for two decades.

I can't divulge more details about what we have created or give any hints. Lets just say that direct experience with these engines has taught us a lot and its time to capitalize on it while helping people avoid calling us with broken stuff.

Jake,
Do you keep track of the IMS bearings that you have replaced? With this information, do you know the amount of miles that have been placed on your bearings or the number of hours of track time they have been exposed to?

Also, how often do you suggest replacing the IMS bearing when using a LN bearing, to be on the safe side?

Thanks.

Interesting, here is what I've been up to....

The vibration level in aircraft engines is monitored continuously and when the vibe level changes in a characteristic manner they know that a failure is imminent - before it actually happens. Simiarly, I am quite confident that there are vibration characteristics that occur as the IMS bearing progressively fails.

This is common aerospace technology and I've been running a vibe sensor on my engine for 2 months. Of course, my engine is running fine so the vibration levels and frequency content always looks the same.

The hard part is getting enough data to characterize the vibration characteristics that occur before the failure goes boom. Aircraft comanies opbtain this data during the engine development process and furthremore they have the money to instrument hundereds of aircraft and then record all of the data and analyze it as the failures start to occur.

I have considered creating a kit to install on customer cars to obtain a wide variety of data sets in the hopes of obtaining some crucial failure data but with failure rates running less than 10% (and maybe less than 5%), I'd have to instrument a LOT of cars to get the data that is needed in any reasonable amount of time.

Of course, an alternative is using a test engine(s) and forcing failures to get the vibe data that characterizes the coming failure. The problem with forcing an engine failure is ensuring that the forced failure completely and fully represents the same type of failure and mode that might happen in the field. Otherwise, all you've done is create a method to detect a failure mode that never occurs in the field.

The ultimate idea, once all of this is sorted out, is that I'll sell a kit to customers that records the vibe data. The customer will upload the vibe data every so often over the internet to my server which will anayze it and tell the customer if a failure might be coming. All remotely.

I'm still early in the process and busy with a lot of other projects so this one is moving pretty slowly but these are my thoughts.

Yes, we keep EVERY SINGLE bearing.. We serialize each, log the owners name and mileage and other data about the engine. We have done this since day one.

The vibration sensor is something that I considered as well. As a Helicopter Crew Chief I used to test aircraft after work was done and the units of measurement was "IPS" or "iterations per second".. This would be one way of noting a trend in a M9 engine, however there are other things that can lead to vibration, not just the IMS.. Even a tank of bad gas can increase vibration.

Anything is better than nothing, but what we are doing is definitely going to give the most early warning possible.

Very cool Jake, can't wait to see what you come up with. Do you need any more bearings that are on the brink of destruction or do you have enough?
Let us know asap.

This is exciting stuff!

Jake, any timeline at all? One month, 2, 6?