alpine003

The uninformed and uneducated guy that doesn't browse forums or internet much and thinks he can fix it cheap since he's rebuilt and worked on a lot of push rod Chevy motors in the past...

fiily

968 imho are a good looking car, but I do love my 951. I just saw a 62k 996 on ebay with a cracked block. I don't know how you guys own these, it seems an inevitable time bomb with either the IMS or the block cracking.

You guys have nerves of steel.

Chiamac

Depends what's wrong with it. An engine to some extent is an engine and a person who has experence building engines shouldn't have too big of a deal getting one of these up and running. Not saying it would be cheap, but that a person could do it themselves with success.

fiily

I have walked away from this deal mentally, just not worth the risk. But the LS3 conversion, that to me is the a long-term fix, both financially and mentally for owners planning to hold onto their cars, or having to do a $10k engine swap.

Byprodriver

This is not your father's Oldsmobile!

Chiamac

No, it's not, it's much more expensive to get parts than any of our parents Oldsmobiles!

alpine003

Not just that but you also have long time mechanics coming on here for technical help and tips even though they may have worked on 100's of other motors. Although it may be just another "engine", there are a couple gotcha places where you need to seek out specific answers/techniques on this motor along with the correct tools.

Chiamac

Correct.

What's the issue with that?

alpine003

Nothing wrong with asking for help or assistance. The point is that you have some Porsche specific mechanics that misdiagnose symptoms on these motors all the time and they've been working on these motors for awhile now. Imagine the Chevy guy buying one of these up thinking it's just a abc problem when in fact it turns out to be a xyz issue. At that point, it can go from a $2k fix to over $5k fix for example. Just because you are a general mechanic doesn't mean you can catch or properly diagnose these motors on the first try.

Chiamac

This would be motor out and stripped down. Everything at that point would be easy to measure. Anything within specs would be kept, anything outside of specs would be replaced.

That wouldn't be too hard with some resources and a shop space to work out of.


Not saying that someone could up and build a track monster, do cute work with the heads, and really do something custom, just that it would be pretty easy to build a motor to stock - not saying cheap, just not hard.

[edit] plus with shop prices to rebuild these engines, assuming it's going back to stock, I'd rather take a shot at it myself and bring it to someone if I run into trouble than having a shop do it for me. At $100 an hour or more I can do a lot of learning.

alpine003

I think some people on here would beg to differ. Have you rebuilt one of these motors? Everyone's gonna have their own definition of "hard". Perhaps we can get some of the members that have done this to chime in( IM000, Schnell Gab, ByproDriver, etc.).

Imo000

Mine block is still apart but when I first pulled the heads 3 years ago, the gottcha moment for me was the timing of the camshafts between the two banks. Having said that, you need to know how to work on engines pretty good to take it apart. In general, up the the point of only pulling the heads, it's not that much different than most variable timing DOHC engines but after that it starts to get really "interesting".

cdk4219

Maybe make it from some aluminum foil. I heard that will last at least 100 years or more.

BRS-LN

The head gaskets are stronger than the block or heads when it comes to the M9X engine. These are multi- layer steel gaskets that simply do not fail. According to my training materials the only head gasket that FSI has seen fail was actually from one of their engines after an owner failed to use a vacuum filling tool to refill the engine after some cooling system maintenance, resulting in an air pocket. It seems that the rest of that story is quite ironic in 2023, even though it happened about 5-6 years ago.

Everything anyone needs to know on the topic of head gaskets/ intermix is covered in this Renncast with Jake Raby
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p4NHv2izv6g
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