Porsche Boxster IMS Failure Rennsport Kansas City
Gosh, I have got so many pictures of projects to blog about and no time 🙁 Hopefully I can get caught up soon. The last month or so we have been slammed with a few races and a lot of maintenance projects. A few long term projects are heading out the door to make way for future winter projects that take a little time. Have a cool 928GTS coming in next week for some big mods, so be ready for that 🙂 The Chump car is back up and running, we will test and tune next weekend to see if the motor is good (we blew a headgasket at HPR, hopefully the bottom end is good). Then chump race end of september, a club race and de in October, and that should about wrap up the race season for us unless we head to texas for a mid winter event.
Had this Boxster towed into the shop the other day due to a low oil pressure light being on. Turns out there was a little ticking in the motor as well, and I had my suspicions, but needed some further diagnosis.
It had been about 6-7k miles since the last oil change when we installed a magnetic drain plug, and slightly over 6 months. Lots of very fine metal shavings. This is why we change oil often in these cars no matter the mileage. The drain plug may have allowed us to catch this earlier, or even better yet, the IMS guardian electronic drain plug detection would have been even better.
After dropping the pan, I found a few slivers in the oil pickup screen, as well as on the pan.
So the motor has to come out 🙁
What was odd to me was this. Chocolate milk in the waterpump. The owner had just replaced the pump last week as a DIY, and didn’t notice anything wrong with the coolant. While the coolant came out nice and fresh, the walls of the waterpump and thermostat housing were coated in oil.
So I pulled the tranny and flywheel off, popped the cover off the IMS bearing, and you could grab the stud and wobble it around! Not good! I can’t believe this motor was actually still running.
And the bearing out of the car. You can see the fine metal shavings around the edge of the seal.
And the bearing disassembled. The race and ball bearings are completely coming apart. Notice the pitting and grooving.
What I scrapped off the edge of the bearing.
In the end, we determined this motor to be a paper weight at this point. The oil in the coolant, low oil pressure, plus the bearing failure at the same time is likely too much risk to attempt putting in a new bearing and running it. A replacement motor is on the way!