[Jake Raby]

There are alternatives, but most are just as risky as buying a used engine. In some cases the used engine is better than the "rebuild" that someone is doing that doesn't understand these engines intimately.

Today what we see has changed from a few years ago. Back then, there were no alternatives, you either bought a new engine from Porsche, or you bought my engine, because no one else was even attempting to do internal work with these engines. Today what we see are not failures like Hammerhead2501's, we are seeing the shoddily rebuilt engines failing, and people come to us because the "alternative" failed. They always say "I should have just brought it here in the first place". They should have, because, in lots of those cases I won't even attempt to work with the engine that the last guy molested, and we have to start from scratch. I am to the point now, where we are not accepting jobs that have these engines installed, since they are such a pain to deal with.

What has happened to this engine is a bit outside the norm. It's failure may end up shedding light on mode of failure 29, as the symptoms were odd, and the failure dynamics are not what I have seen before all wrapped into one failure.

We will know in a couple of weeks. Hammerhead2501 faces a big decision, and its a shame that he owned the car for such a short period. Lucky for him, he's less than 80 miles from where all the magic happens, and where the first M96 engine program was started. I hope to resurrect this one.