bought 03 S today - 986 Forum - The Community for Porsche Boxster & Cayman Owners

Perfectlap · 03-29-2010, 08:47 AM

^Read the link below, they are a forum sponsor. As far as preventative measures for a car, this one has probably by far the biggest reward should there be a problem.

The one problem with waiting for the clutch to go is that your driving style can add a few extra years to the life of the clutch and push you past the break point on the IMS failure (if you are in fact in that small danger pool). If I'm not mistaken 'most' of the failures have occurred after 70K miles. But it's not unheard for it to happen well before then....

p.s. If you have a December 2008 issue of Excellence they discuss the procedure and there is a more in depth article coming out later in the year.

http://flat6innovations.com/saving-an-engine-ims-retrofit

I love this picture

Perfectlap · 04-02-2010, 11:19 AM

bump,
LN IMS is going in today...with a new clutch and flywheel. i wasn't counting on that last part. But apparently I waited too long too for the clutch change. The flywheel had dark purplish scoring all over. My indy said it was a 50/50 on getting chatter if I kept it in. After this much work I decided to just to spend the extra $600. Talk about a repair job: six different parts in one shot.

The more I think about it the more I think it makes sense to do this job sooner than later if you're car is over the 50K mile mark. If you lose out on the last couple of years of clutch life, its not really that big a deal. Say a new clutch runs $1200 and lasts you 6 years or 60K miles, that works out being $200 a year. So you pass up $400 but you still have a new clutch at the end of the day and the probably less than 1% chance of your engine grenading comes down to a fraction of 1%. I think that's worth $400.

yimmy149 · 04-02-2010, 11:44 AM

Is there an easy way to see how much clutch is left? I don't have detailed history on my car, so it may or may not be original.

-james

Perfectlap · 04-02-2010, 02:11 PM

Are you only the second owner? Try and track down where the car was sold new, maybe its in your owner's manual stamped on the back. Give them a call and ask if they can send you the records. If the last owner had it done out of warranty I'm sure he would have had it done by a dealer anyway. I'm guessing the average Porsche owner, even a used buyer, usually has major work like this done by a dealer and not an independent shop. There aren't that many and most mechanics who don't regularly fix Porsches won't touch them.

yimmy149 · 04-02-2010, 03:51 PM

Unfortunately the car has had a few different owners, and lived in two different states. When I got the car I saw it had had a couple of it's services at the local Porsche dealer, I went and talked to the service advisor and he said he'd see if he could get me some records. He seemed eager to sell me a warranty... but he stopped returning my calls. Barrier Porsche sucks.

ekam · 04-02-2010, 04:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by yimmy149

Is there an easy way to see how much clutch is left? I don't have detailed history on my car, so it may or may not be original.

-james

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOhD2aXjnus

Can't really tell how much is left but you can tell when it's going.