986 Forum - The Community for Porsche Boxster & Cayman Owners - View Single Post - Another IMS question :-(

JFP in PA · 01-01-2016, 08:38 AM

While my opinion may differ from that of others, I do RMS/IMS retrofits for a living, and therefore have a somewhat different view of the subject.

If you have 150K on the car, and it has a leaking RMS, it is only a matter of time before the RMS leak is going to foul the clutch and need replacement.; that is a simple fact of life. To have a shop replace the RMS (and the clutch), you will spend 80-85% of the cost to do a solo IMS retrofit. If both cases, the trans, clutch and flywheel have to come out, and then both the RMS and IMS are out in the open. It takes about 5 min. to do the RMS with the factory tooling, and about another hour or so to do the IMS once the engine is in this condition. Not replacing the IMS at this time therefore makes little economic sense, as you would have to pay a second time to do it in the future. Similar economics come into play on some other updates as well, the AOS for instance takes a good shop about 2 hours on an assembled car, but with the trans out becomes a 15 min. project.

As for which IMS to use, realistically there is really only one based upon the totally numbers of successful installations: the LN units. We have installed many of them without any problems, and currently there are nearly 25,000 of them on the street world wide without problems. No other supplier can even remotely come close to making that statement, and many of the "me-too" options are not everything they are made out to be. Don't make your choices on the basis of cost alone, look at the unit's reputations and installed base before coming to a conclusion, and you will be glad you did long term.

01-01-2016, 08:38 AM	#12
JFP in PA Registered User Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: It's a kind of magic..... Posts: 6,614	While my opinion may differ from that of others, I do RMS/IMS retrofits for a living, and therefore have a somewhat different view of the subject. If you have 150K on the car, and it has a leaking RMS, it is only a matter of time before the RMS leak is going to foul the clutch and need replacement.; that is a simple fact of life. To have a shop replace the RMS (and the clutch), you will spend 80-85% of the cost to do a solo IMS retrofit. If both cases, the trans, clutch and flywheel have to come out, and then both the RMS and IMS are out in the open. It takes about 5 min. to do the RMS with the factory tooling, and about another hour or so to do the IMS once the engine is in this condition. Not replacing the IMS at this time therefore makes little economic sense, as you would have to pay a second time to do it in the future. Similar economics come into play on some other updates as well, the AOS for instance takes a good shop about 2 hours on an assembled car, but with the trans out becomes a 15 min. project. As for which IMS to use, realistically there is really only one based upon the totally numbers of successful installations: the LN units. We have installed many of them without any problems, and currently there are nearly 25,000 of them on the street world wide without problems. No other supplier can even remotely come close to making that statement, and many of the "me-too" options are not everything they are made out to be. Don't make your choices on the basis of cost alone, look at the unit's reputations and installed base before coming to a conclusion, and you will be glad you did long term. __________________ “Anything really new is invented only in one’s youth. Later, one becomes more experienced, more famous – and more stupid.” - Albert Einstein Last edited by JFP in PA; 01-01-2016 at 03:04 PM.