The latest IMS loss. A true classic failure

[smshirk]

Originally Posted by Flavor 987S

Always doom & gloom from Jake Raby. Must be good for business.

Is this why you have been banned from other Porsche enthusiast web sites??

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.

[clickman]

Originally Posted by smshirk

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.

[Jake Raby]

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


Biggest piece of the valve seat that still existed


Mining for gold in the oil filter


Whats missing here?? Its blown apart and in the intake and mufflers!


This is what its supposed to look like.. The seat is gone!!


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


Thats a nice piston


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.

[tonycarreon]

Originally Posted by Jake Raby

Finally we have created a method of forecasting impending IMS failure prior to a big boom. ... 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!

[thstone]

Originally Posted by Jake Raby

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.

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.

[Banana S]

Originally Posted by Jake Raby

... Hell, I can't believe that no one has made any smart ass statements about or most recent Excellence Ad.

Is Boxster still spelled "Boxtser" in this month's ad? I've been hoping you'd get them to fix that, one of these days.

My car, with it's Raby IMS Retrofit, is still running strong, by the way. I already have 2 track days scheduled in May, and another one in July.

[Jake Raby]

Thats great to hear!!! It has a had a recent Birthday, has't it? LOL

[dmatz]

My apologies if you’ve seen this posting in other forums. I’m trying to raise awareness of this subject.
I have an 04 Boxster that had confirmed IMS failure last week at 58K miles. Dealer employees, including service managers, have admitted to me that they have a significant number of IMS failures in this engine, and didn’t deny that it should have been a recall. I didn’t know of this defect until it (probably) happened to me, and feel angry that Porsche sold me a car without revealing a fatal design flaw (sealed bearing with seal that fails in normal use, then relying on inadequate lubrication from crankcase oil splash).
When I called Porsche (1-800 Porsche), I was told there was no recall for the IMS defect because “the government orders recalls and they didn’t order a recall” for the IMS issue. Recalls are triggered by complaints to the NHTSA – not very many complaints, no recall. NHTSA complaints and investigations can be researched at their website: http://www.safercar.gov/Vehicle+Owners . Between MY 2000 and 2005 there were only 6 IMS failures reported with std or S Boxsters. Brief internet searches reveal that the actual failure rate is certainly much higher than these numbers would suggest. Complaints can easily be filed at the NHTSA website. If everyone with IMS failures went to the NHTSA website and filed a complaint, perhaps an investigation and thus a recall might be triggered. I’m not sure if a recall could be ordered for cars this old, but at least the relevant government agency should adequately notified. If the government took action, Porsche would be forced to respond.