Cayman S engine failure and how Porsche will deal with you.
Discussion
Just to catch up on a few things.
(1) The arguments' about hotter climates being less of a problem are not proven. We don't know how many fail or not and the thermostat position may actually help prevent shut down of coolant flow as I explained before relating to a third radiator potentially making things worse. We must also relate to speed limits like in the USA where films of the "chase" often show a speedo rising to the frighteningly high speed of 60mph!
(2) I do understand why some fail at lower mileages and others at higher mileages - but am not prepared to divulge that to our opposition yet.
(3) Regardless of the bore scoring issue all engines will slowly allow the cylinders to go oval and increase bore clearances (Porsche even made the head gasket so it allowed this to happen while preserving the plastic head gasket seal) so eventually the additional clearance will increase blow by and piston face temperatures or the cylinders will crack.
(4) By converting the cylinders to a closed deck we remove both possibilities (both for alloy Nikasil replacement cylinders and original Lokasil cylinders).
(5) Some drivers will just happen to have a style that helps avoid problems while others will not and the mix during different ownerships contributes to lifespan although the quality variations of the original Lokasil preform combined with unsuitable piston design and coatings has the greatest influence.
I hope you guys will understand and appreciate that we provide huge amounts of technical information FOC that is useful to competitors who contribute nothing - but we have to preserve some knowledge for ourselves until the time is right - to justify the huge costs we devote to R and D.
Baz
(1) The arguments' about hotter climates being less of a problem are not proven. We don't know how many fail or not and the thermostat position may actually help prevent shut down of coolant flow as I explained before relating to a third radiator potentially making things worse. We must also relate to speed limits like in the USA where films of the "chase" often show a speedo rising to the frighteningly high speed of 60mph!
(2) I do understand why some fail at lower mileages and others at higher mileages - but am not prepared to divulge that to our opposition yet.
(3) Regardless of the bore scoring issue all engines will slowly allow the cylinders to go oval and increase bore clearances (Porsche even made the head gasket so it allowed this to happen while preserving the plastic head gasket seal) so eventually the additional clearance will increase blow by and piston face temperatures or the cylinders will crack.
(4) By converting the cylinders to a closed deck we remove both possibilities (both for alloy Nikasil replacement cylinders and original Lokasil cylinders).
(5) Some drivers will just happen to have a style that helps avoid problems while others will not and the mix during different ownerships contributes to lifespan although the quality variations of the original Lokasil preform combined with unsuitable piston design and coatings has the greatest influence.
I hope you guys will understand and appreciate that we provide huge amounts of technical information FOC that is useful to competitors who contribute nothing - but we have to preserve some knowledge for ourselves until the time is right - to justify the huge costs we devote to R and D.
Baz
I cannot get my head round this , porche build an engine not fit for the purpose etc and stick two fingers up.
In warranty or not how can they turn there back on it if its an on going fault same as the IMS.
Going off at a tangent, Renault Nissan Vauxhall build a Renault traffic style van all same van different badge for the past 5 - 6 yrs have had injector problems, gearbox problems, and suspension problems, they done the same as porche stuck two fingers up or in some cases a minimal contribution.
If you look on the net hundreds of complaints all falling on deaf ears.
WATCHDOG BBC THIS WEEK is featuring these vans and the problems interesting to see the outcome.
In warranty or not how can they turn there back on it if its an on going fault same as the IMS.
Going off at a tangent, Renault Nissan Vauxhall build a Renault traffic style van all same van different badge for the past 5 - 6 yrs have had injector problems, gearbox problems, and suspension problems, they done the same as porche stuck two fingers up or in some cases a minimal contribution.
If you look on the net hundreds of complaints all falling on deaf ears.
WATCHDOG BBC THIS WEEK is featuring these vans and the problems interesting to see the outcome.
Trev450 said:
ilduce said:
Ah well, I won't care if mine blows up a second time- I sold it last week!
Hurrah!
Oh and Porsche if you're listening: that was the first and last one I'll buy ok?
Does that mean we won't have to read your inane comments any more. Hurrah!
Oh and Porsche if you're listening: that was the first and last one I'll buy ok?
Oh and with the money I'm saving, I'm going to pay for that operation to get your head out of your ars'e.
No need to thank me.
I have not studied what people on the other side of the Atlantic actually think or provide but I do know that very often different engineers find different explanations for issues and sometimes even different solutions that can both work.
However the random nature of the failures and the fact that they take years and thousands of miles to expose themselves - makes proving anything very difficult.
In this respect, despite claims to the contrary over the pond, we started working on these engines long before most others and it is also a fact that the problem of cylinder bore material and relative expansion rates - was first looked at by me in the early '70's when I designed and manufactured racing alloy cylinders for the TD1 Yamaha racers to bring them up to TD2 specification (with my business "Barton Motors". This involved both chrome bores and later Nikasil bores and the manufacture of new cylinders.
Following that I manufactured both complete cylinders and both steel, iron and alloy liners - discovered the problems associated and ended up with a very successful business eventually manufacturing and developing complete racing engines that Won at GP level against Japanese and Italian "works" opposition. I have not mentioned this to brag but simply to explain that over 40 years ago I was involved in the very problems and solutions we later found in the M96 and M97 engines and so already had a massive head start on the technical issues and the practical manufactured solutions that worked at a level capable of being as good or better than the established industrial leaders of the time.
As the specific output from Car engines increased the very same problems and solutions emerged and at around the same time alloy cylinders and cylinder blocks with hard surfaces became the answer - namely Alusil blocks with Ferrous coated pistons..
The combination of the Lokasil preform with plastic coated pistons is different and does not provide a solution that has the level of reliability required. It is close to it (only a small percentage fail) but not an acceptable level. Even the engineer at the crankcase manufacturers said "it will only ever work with ferrous coated pistons that are no longer available in the EU for health and safety reasons".
The original Alusil cylinders - despite being "open deck" were much stronger than the Lokasil alternative so didn't go oval as soon or as much (usually only in combination with high output turbo charged cylinder loads). This means that Lokasil cylinders have a double whammy problem - if they don't score they probably will eventually crack!
It is impossible to be certain what the direct causes of the failures of Lokasil cylinders are but in my view there are several contributory factors. Some are more relevant than others.
The biggest problem is the lack of consistency in the distribution of silicon particles and their reduced bonding security in the Lokasil preform.
The asymmetric nature of the cooling system and the position for the thermostat combined with its temperature setting do not help.
If you put together all these various potential problems and combine them with the different driving styles and maintenance qualities, oil choices, ambient conditions, etc you come up with a puzzle difficult to reliably analyse and provide proof for.
This is why we have painstakingly tested contributory issues and come up with changes to the thermostat rating, coolant distribution, closed deck modification, piston coating etc etc and provided advice on driving styles etc all because it is a combination of problems that make some fail early and others not. The more changes that combine to improve things the better the likely outcome.
The fact that in the Turbo and GT3 versions Porsche themselves use Nikasil plated alloy liners (exactly as I did 40 years ago and as we do for these engines now) should provide some confidence in our solution to this problem as should the numbers we have successfully fitted with this solutions for many years without difficulty.
The fact that we manufacture many of the parts that are to our design and fit the parts ourselves with our own "in house" precision machine shop should also add confidence to the outcome.
Finally Porsche seemed unable to come up with an answer - so please don't expect it to be an easy problem to solve. We believe we understand the whole problem and the solutions but some of that is our intellectual property that has cost us a lot to develop and that we are not going to reveal in full technical detail for our opposition to benefit from.
Recently we have invested in new machinery and facilities to enable us to provide the highest level of solutions to this problem at the most reasonable costs. We could only justify this if we maintain some secrets about what we know to be the causes and solutions - sorry!
However - despite the fact that we have a fantastic solution available with Nikasil alloy liners - we have not given up on trying to find a less expensive solution that is just as reliable using the original Lokasil bore material. We are still pursuing a development started many years ago and it is in understanding what causes the bore scoring that this development program is based - so explaining it detail will indeed give our competitors something we prefer to keep up our sleeves.
It may be that we don't manage to solve the problem or it may be that we do but as this range of cars age and the values drop - owners will still have problems that need fixing but the costs will need to be critically looked at again to make repairs viable.
We hope to be in a position to offer something to help and this is why we are both continuing with the development and keeping some of the knowledge we have gained to ourselves for the moment.
But please don't lose sight of the fact that as well as bore scoring these engines will all have cylinders going oval. increasing bore clearances etc etc and that one day these otherwise brilliant cars will need engine rebuilds and when they do all that research and investment in solutions we hope will benefit both ourselves and our customers more than our opposition.
Baz
However the random nature of the failures and the fact that they take years and thousands of miles to expose themselves - makes proving anything very difficult.
In this respect, despite claims to the contrary over the pond, we started working on these engines long before most others and it is also a fact that the problem of cylinder bore material and relative expansion rates - was first looked at by me in the early '70's when I designed and manufactured racing alloy cylinders for the TD1 Yamaha racers to bring them up to TD2 specification (with my business "Barton Motors". This involved both chrome bores and later Nikasil bores and the manufacture of new cylinders.
Following that I manufactured both complete cylinders and both steel, iron and alloy liners - discovered the problems associated and ended up with a very successful business eventually manufacturing and developing complete racing engines that Won at GP level against Japanese and Italian "works" opposition. I have not mentioned this to brag but simply to explain that over 40 years ago I was involved in the very problems and solutions we later found in the M96 and M97 engines and so already had a massive head start on the technical issues and the practical manufactured solutions that worked at a level capable of being as good or better than the established industrial leaders of the time.
As the specific output from Car engines increased the very same problems and solutions emerged and at around the same time alloy cylinders and cylinder blocks with hard surfaces became the answer - namely Alusil blocks with Ferrous coated pistons..
The combination of the Lokasil preform with plastic coated pistons is different and does not provide a solution that has the level of reliability required. It is close to it (only a small percentage fail) but not an acceptable level. Even the engineer at the crankcase manufacturers said "it will only ever work with ferrous coated pistons that are no longer available in the EU for health and safety reasons".
The original Alusil cylinders - despite being "open deck" were much stronger than the Lokasil alternative so didn't go oval as soon or as much (usually only in combination with high output turbo charged cylinder loads). This means that Lokasil cylinders have a double whammy problem - if they don't score they probably will eventually crack!
It is impossible to be certain what the direct causes of the failures of Lokasil cylinders are but in my view there are several contributory factors. Some are more relevant than others.
The biggest problem is the lack of consistency in the distribution of silicon particles and their reduced bonding security in the Lokasil preform.
The asymmetric nature of the cooling system and the position for the thermostat combined with its temperature setting do not help.
If you put together all these various potential problems and combine them with the different driving styles and maintenance qualities, oil choices, ambient conditions, etc you come up with a puzzle difficult to reliably analyse and provide proof for.
This is why we have painstakingly tested contributory issues and come up with changes to the thermostat rating, coolant distribution, closed deck modification, piston coating etc etc and provided advice on driving styles etc all because it is a combination of problems that make some fail early and others not. The more changes that combine to improve things the better the likely outcome.
The fact that in the Turbo and GT3 versions Porsche themselves use Nikasil plated alloy liners (exactly as I did 40 years ago and as we do for these engines now) should provide some confidence in our solution to this problem as should the numbers we have successfully fitted with this solutions for many years without difficulty.
The fact that we manufacture many of the parts that are to our design and fit the parts ourselves with our own "in house" precision machine shop should also add confidence to the outcome.
Finally Porsche seemed unable to come up with an answer - so please don't expect it to be an easy problem to solve. We believe we understand the whole problem and the solutions but some of that is our intellectual property that has cost us a lot to develop and that we are not going to reveal in full technical detail for our opposition to benefit from.
Recently we have invested in new machinery and facilities to enable us to provide the highest level of solutions to this problem at the most reasonable costs. We could only justify this if we maintain some secrets about what we know to be the causes and solutions - sorry!
However - despite the fact that we have a fantastic solution available with Nikasil alloy liners - we have not given up on trying to find a less expensive solution that is just as reliable using the original Lokasil bore material. We are still pursuing a development started many years ago and it is in understanding what causes the bore scoring that this development program is based - so explaining it detail will indeed give our competitors something we prefer to keep up our sleeves.
It may be that we don't manage to solve the problem or it may be that we do but as this range of cars age and the values drop - owners will still have problems that need fixing but the costs will need to be critically looked at again to make repairs viable.
We hope to be in a position to offer something to help and this is why we are both continuing with the development and keeping some of the knowledge we have gained to ourselves for the moment.
But please don't lose sight of the fact that as well as bore scoring these engines will all have cylinders going oval. increasing bore clearances etc etc and that one day these otherwise brilliant cars will need engine rebuilds and when they do all that research and investment in solutions we hope will benefit both ourselves and our customers more than our opposition.
Baz
ilduce said:
Trev450 said:
ilduce said:
Ah well, I won't care if mine blows up a second time- I sold it last week!
Hurrah!
Oh and Porsche if you're listening: that was the first and last one I'll buy ok?
Does that mean we won't have to read your inane comments any more. Hurrah!
Oh and Porsche if you're listening: that was the first and last one I'll buy ok?
Oh and with the money I'm saving, I'm going to pay for that operation to get your head out of your ars'e.
No need to thank me.
Oh, and I won't charge for this advice.
matthall said:
The catalyst for me to bale out was I recently popped into a top rated indie to discuss a possible upgrade, and when discussing px for mine they told me they had recently made the decision to NO LONGER retail 997.1 C2Ss as they couldn't take the financial risk as they underwrite themselves for 1 yr - they would sell it trade to someone else.
...
Oh and btw, this indie also said, do NOT use Super unleaded, they think this contributes to bore scoring, something about how its stored and etahnol....seriously.
Was this JZM by any chance? I was told the same line about Super Unleaded by the younger sales guy there (I chose to ignore it as the logic doesn't make sense to me, and I still use V-Power in my car). I had noticed that they haven't had any non Turbo or GT 997s in for a while now. Interestingly they are still happy to deal with Gen1 Cayman Ss though, so they obviously don't consider them a high risk of bore scoring....
Oh and btw, this indie also said, do NOT use Super unleaded, they think this contributes to bore scoring, something about how its stored and etahnol....seriously.
Well because as you have identified, Super unleaded doesn't seem to have any higher ethanol content than regular unleaded. And I choose to follow Porsche's recommendation of 98+ ron fuel. I don't claim to be one of the keyboard technicians this forum has so many of, so that's as detailed a response as you're gonna get from me I'm afraid. I'm happy with the fuel I've been using (V-Power and Tesco 99) for the 55000 miles I've driven in the car (which is now on 82k total), it's my car, and I shouldn't have to explain any further to strangers on an Internet forum! 
But that isn't the main point of my last post. My point is that this is a thread about Cayman enigne failures, but a specialist who is wary of 997.1s is more than happy to trade 987.1s, so they must see a far smaller number of 987 failures than 997s.
But that isn't the main point of my last post. My point is that this is a thread about Cayman enigne failures, but a specialist who is wary of 997.1s is more than happy to trade 987.1s, so they must see a far smaller number of 987 failures than 997s.
northernmedia said:
Sorry, it has exactly the same problems as the 997.1
I'm not saying the problem doesn't exist, but suggesting that it perhaps isn't as frequent. Excuse me if I mis-quote, but I believe Hartech have themselves said in the past that the problem is exacerbated in the larger capacity engines (which was also why it was less of an issue with the early 3.2 987 Boxsters), hence why specialists such as JZM may be unwilling to take the risk on 997s but are seemingly happy to trade and warranty gen1 Caymans.
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