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once these swirl pots are disassembled they can’t just be clipped back together. You must drill a hole at the point where they fit together, and either rivet, or safety wire them tightly together.
if these separate, you will ha e an instant failure on the track, and it’ll take longer on the street.
I lost a test engine in 2008 when one of these separated. It lasted 1/2 lap at Road Atlanta with the swirl pot separated.
You can easily put them back together, you just have to do the task using a secondary fastener since originally these have a melted plastic tab that holds them together. To get them apart the melted tab must be broken.
We have seen these melted tabs break, the swirl pots separate, and lead to heavy aeration of the oil, and engine failure on the track. Due to this even on brand new units Iutilize a rivet, or safety wire to add a secondary means of fastening, just to be safe on all Stage II engines.
When you remove the sump plate, and find 1/2 of a swirl pot after a failure, you've just diagnosed the underlying condition that led to it.
Swirl pots are clear. I took the bottoms off and left them upside down over a coffee filter for 10 minutes or so. No flakes. In the pics it might look like there are metal specks. I checked them, they're not metal.
I wasn't in the mood to mess with the borescope. Maybe tomorrow. I drilled the holes in the tabs on the side of the pots and will grab some safety wire tomorrow along with a soft metal brush to help clean the bottom of the sump plate.
Was there a stock color for the sump plate sealant? I saw in a video the stuff Porsche sells now is black. The stuff that was on there was brown. Just wondering if it's ever been off.
Last edited by ssherman68; 05-28-2021 at 10:17 PM.
I’ve been where you are. Deep breaths. Since you’ve already refilled with oil and run, maybe try pulling the filter again (you can pull the filter without draining all the oil) and have another look. This was my filter a few years back. Material was ferrous. After a fairly extensive exploratory search, it turned out to be my IMSB (which had been swapped for an LN bearing by previous owner). Before the boo-birds jump in and start dumping on LN, there is no way I can confirm how the bearing was installed, handled or treated, so I can’t blame the bearing or LN. For all I know the bearing had been dropped on the floor before installing. Charles from LN was extremely helpful in helping to diagnose mine. Standup guy in my books.
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I know LN won’t guarantee or recommend replacing a bearing that has already failed. So what did you do? Did you have to rebuild your engine to get the bearing replaced?
I know LN won’t guarantee or recommend replacing a bearing that has already failed. So what did you do? Did you have to rebuild your engine to get the bearing replaced?
After much deliberation and many back and forth with Charles, I replaced the bearing with a new LN Single Row Retrofit (which is double row). That was winter 2017, and 25,000 miles later, all good. Once I finally resigned myself to pulling the transmission and checking the IMSB, it was obvious this was my issue. Bearing felt slightly rough, but had some definite play in it.
I got the swirl pots put together, wired up and back in. After that I tried playing with the borescope a bit. It’s my first time using it here. It’d been a while since I looked at cylinder numbering and I though 6 was right rear so that’s where I was focusing. I just looked it up and it’s actually right front.
Anyway, I thought people might find them interesting and I have some questions.
This is basically looking straight up from the center of the oil sump on the right hand side. I'm not sure what this is but there is definitely some wear here. Does anyone know if this looks normal?
Cylinder 4 is on the right. See the little silver fleck in the middle of the picture just outside of cylinder 4? I'm trying to figure out if this is a piece of metal.
Bottom of piston #4. Entertainment purposes only.
Last edited by ssherman68; 05-29-2021 at 08:16 PM.
This is what I thought would be easy, but not so, at least without some direction or practice. Trying to look at the cylinder walls for me was tough from the pan up. I think my bore scope is small enough in diameter and certainly long enough, but I had a tough time getting a good enough look to to feel absolutely certain I didn’t have scoring.
I did a little more looking around with the endoscope yesterday and found a few things that look troubling. I'm not 100% sure if I'm looking at what I think I'm looking at though. I'm hoping someone can confirm my suspicions or tell me I'm seeing the wrong things.
I went through the right side of the oil sump between cylinders 4 and 5 and mostly straight up past the cylinders themselves and towards the top of the crankcase. (I also got some pics inside #5 but that doesn't matter here).
This appears to be the inside of the top of the bearing case with what look to be some pretty bad wear marks. It also looks like the crankcase might be cracked above it:
Tube (bolt?) near the top of the crankcase with metal flakes. When I took the picture they looked like they might be air bubbles in the oil but now that I look at the picture blown up, I'm pretty sure they're metal:
I did a little more looking around with the endoscope yesterday and found a few things that look troubling. I'm not 100% sure if I'm looking at what I think I'm looking at though. I'm hoping someone can confirm my suspicions or tell me I'm seeing the wrong things.
I went through the right side of the oil sump between cylinders 4 and 5 and mostly straight up past the cylinders themselves and towards the top of the crankcase. (I also got some pics inside #5 but that doesn't matter here).
This appears to be the inside of the top of the bearing case with what look to be some pretty bad wear marks. It also looks like the crankcase might be cracked above it:
Tube (bolt?) near the top of the crankcase with metal flakes. When I took the picture they looked like they might be air bubbles in the oil but now that I look at the picture blown up, I'm pretty sure they're metal:
Any ideas? Am I seeing what I think I'm seeing?
What you are seeing is cost cutting in the flesh. These deficiencies are normal, and expected. I see nothing here to be concerned with-
Thank you for looking at it Jake. That's a big load off. It looked bad to me. I'll wait for the UOA to come back around the end of the week and see what that says.
There was nothing in the filter during the PPI a year ago and the first two oil changes without any track use. This change was 3,500 miles of use including 3 trips to the track. They were my first ever track events and I was doing DE so I didn't think I was taxing the car too hard (I'm just not that good). I'm wondering about the possibility of this being a one time event that happened at the track. My last session, I spun out and ended up slowly going backwards into the dirt while it was still in gear (forgot to put the clutch in). After talking to the instructor about it he said that could do bad things to the engine. It's had 300-400 miles on it since then.
Depending on what the UOA says, I'm thinking I might look at the filter that I put 6 miles on, put a new filter in and drive it another 30 miles or so and see if I'm still getting metal in there. If not, I can increase the intervals and keep an eye on it. If so, I guess it's time to take it to my indy and have them start investigating.
I got the UOA back today. The viscosity and oxidation were low which is probably to be expected after using it on the track 3 times (lesson learned). Other than that, nothing looks alarming to me. One note, the total wear metals value of the previous sample is wrong (should be 6.8).
Anything I should be concerned about? I know Jake says that this is mostly for trending and only tiny pieces of metal can be found in the UOA.
Since previous oil filters were clean and the sump/swirl pots were clean I'm wondering if this could have been a one time event on the track. Can that happen? I did spin out and roll backwards for a bit without putting the clutch in. I heard that can be bad for the engine.
So the question is, what next? Rather than have someone tear the engine apart I'm inclined to put oil back in it, drive it for another 50 miles or so and check the filter again to see if this is continuing. I don't want to risk more serious engine damage but I also don't want to spend thousands on taking the engine out and possibly splitting the case until I know this is ongoing.
So, to sum up: 1999 C2, 45K total miles on original engine. Had it for a year. Filter check on PPI was good and my last two filter checks were good too. Small ferrous metal flakes were found in the oil filter this last change after 3,500 miles and 3 DE track events. PO had IMSB replaced with LN dual row ~3 years & 10K miles ago. I saw the original bearing and it looked & felt good. It didn't wobble but did come to a stop quickly rather than taking several seconds to spin down. Not sure if that is normal or not.
05-28-2021, 02:32 PM
