sbrst60

I recently took my 996 in for oil service at a porsche specialty shop thats been in business for about 25 years. They race, etc, busy place. I asked the service manager what he thought about the IMS failures.

He said they have recently been inundated with questions about IMS due to the internet chatter. He also said they had never seen one, or knows anyone that has ever had an IMS failure.

But he did have a customer requested preventative IMS replacement scheduled for the following week..

Flat6 Innovations

Before we perfected the IMS Retrofit procedure the only thing that could be done was seal removal.. Now that the retrofit procedure is so perfected its not really more expense to just replace the bearing while the flange is removed. The labor difference is less than two hours at that point.

I have never seen an issue where a splash lubricated roller bearing could be "over-lubricated".

sdstimson

Hey I just replaced the IMS bearing in my 996, because of all of the talk about it. And, good thing I did because it was absolutely shot. It was a 6spd 80K miles well taken care of, but by no means was babied.
I highly recommend doing it, I ended up replacing that along with the clutch and rear main seal, everything only took about 10 hours to complete, and was well worth it, the IMS bearing wouldn't have lasted another week had I not replaced it.

fpb111

Pics?

sdstimson

Here are some pics of my ims bearing. When I got to the bearing it was slightly leaking, when I got it out their was no burnt oil and almost no oil in the tube.
After reading the stories about it, and then when I was at IPB autosport an 01 came in with the bearing failure making me decide to do it, I got all the parts and went ahead and did it. I have my own hobby shop that I put a lift in that me and my son (when he is home from college) play on our cars. So it made the job a lot easier, did the whole job in ten hours. The car just turned 80K was well taken care of, driven like it supposed to be driven, and it was a manual.

countrysquire

How did you disassemble the bearing to inspect the ***** & races?

ivangene

DUDE!!!
that is the second worse bearing I have seen! I hope you think you "did the right thing" because I doubt it would have been long before that one gave out!!!!!



WOW!

edit - I see your earlier post.... no sh@t it would not have lasted long....no noise, no "signs of failure"??? but holy crap it was on the ragged edge!

Flat6 Innovations

That bearing was on the way out.. The reason why their was no oil in the tube is because BOTh the inner and outer seals had been compromised allowing the oil to drain back out of the tube. This is what generally creates the "IMS OIL LEAK" but not in all cases.

You dodged a bullet on this one by doing the procedure electively. Good for you.

ivangene

Jake, how many have you seen that bad that still run? - saw (1) came in for clutch and "happened" to get caught at the dealer, then towed over to the shop - it was saved but man, close!

Flat6 Innovations

Maybe five total. Generally when they look like that its already gotten bad enough for valve/piston interference and the collateral damage takes the engine out before the bearing completely grenades.

ivangene

yea, that one above is pretty bad.... to sds* - nice bit of luck dodging a pretty certain problem!!!

Nutty Professor

I replaced my IMS bearing with the LN upgrade two weeks ago myself on my '03 C4S (83K miles). I never disassembled the bearing. Instead I sent it back to LN Engineering for them to have for research. Now I'm curious as to how my original bearing looked. From the outside, the bearing looked fine. But you can't judge a book by its cover. I'm just happy to have peace of mind now after the replacing the IMS, especially after seeing this thread.

JOL

even though I'm out of the game, I'm curious if Porsche has ever recommended changing the IMS bearing as part of normal maintenance? Or would that be admitting there was an inherent problem?

slashmatt

So, the original poster uses non-recommended oil, spends thousands on a warranty and parts; there's no evidence that the oil leak had anything to do with an IMS failure. I'm going to consider this 996 IMS Myth Busted #4.

ivangene

the revival let me look at "nutty's" avatar pic again - so this was worth it!