"Curious Ed- why did they replace all the rollers and tensioners? I had my dealer replace a broken water pump at 59k recently, and they just replaced the water pump (S-belt was still good, as it was just replaced at 50k). Is it normal practice to replace all the pulleys and tensioner during this repair?"
Good question, my mechanic said its a good idea when he is in there to do the pullys and tensioner, as he has seen them lock up in high mileage boxsters. He showed me a couple of locked up bearings on his shelf of bunged up parts from boxsters (80-100K). Bearings locked up, cooked the belt and left the owner high and dry. He said it would be easy for him to do when he was doing the water pump, I did not know the parts cost would be over 200.00, my bad.
He also said I should be aware of wheel bearings as I approach 90K on the car. But he did not recommend replacing them till they start to misbehave, as you can go with noisy bearings for awhile. BTW, I have the original wheel bearings and they are fine so far (as was my water pump apparently....).
He said I may also want to think about replacing my ignition switch as well as the electronics on the rear end of the ignition "gun" assembly, as he has seen quite a few failures in high mileage Boxsters. To be fair, my mechanic knows that I pretty regularly do long road trips with my car (1,500 miles round trip) and that I have been putting 15K miles on the car a year for the last 3 years.
Ed
