Cayman S engine failure and how Porsche will deal with you.
Discussion
anonymous said:
[redacted]
Note the use of any further in my post!One person has the right to post their opinions without being subjected to an inquisition over and over again. You asked a question, I responded with why I think that viewpoint makes no sense to me, and made clear that that is from a non-technical perspective. So my point was meant as a lighthearted way (hence the smiley - which was clearly lost on you) of saying that I have no further explanations to offer, nor should I need to provide any.
To continue to interrogate someone who has given an opinion whilst stating they are not mechanically minded is not going to gain you any credible answers to your questions is it, so what's the point?
Besides, as I mentioned, that wasn't the main point of my post, so I didn't really want to drag it out. The main thing for me is that all of the OPCs and specialists I have personally given business to have said they see very few Caymans with engine issues compared to 997s. If JZM have indeed stopped selling 997s directly, but they do still sell gen1 Caymans, that supports the sugestion that, although still a possibility, the likelyhood of bore scoring is much smaller in the 987 than 997.
I'm really not looking to get into any great debates on the matter, just saying that to me, it speaks volumes that a well respected specialist will refuse to retail one model but will the other.
Edited by ChipsAndCheese on Tuesday 18th November 14:28
ChipsAndCheese said:
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.
Revolution Porsche have also had a number of them in.
anonymous said:
[redacted]
Genuinely curious to know what evidence you have to prove this. Or are you just going by what you have heard on here and elsewhere on the Internet?If going by threads on here, then we could make any old assumptions. Most of the engine failure threads I have read on here seem to have happened at low-ish mileages - is it therefore fair to say that if it's going to happen it's more likely to happen early on? Or that if the car is not used frequently it's more likely to happen? I don't think we can make such claims. Unless you can prove otherwise, I don't think it's fair to say early cars are more likely to score their bores, or Caymans are more likely to suffer than 3.4 Boxsters.
If you have evidence of a pattern that proves early cars suffer more, then perhaps someone with actual expertise and facilities (i.e. Baz) would be able to comment on whether they have found differences in liner material for engines they've had in their workshop?
Edited by ChipsAndCheese on Tuesday 18th November 17:15
anonymous said:
[redacted]
No, I saw that. But as I said, I was genuinely curious to know if you had some other supporting evidence to lead you to that viewpoint that I had missed. Not saying that you were claiming it as fact. I haven't picked up on an age pattern from the threads I have seen but then I post here less than you. The pattern I noticed seemed to be lower mileage cars.But either way, IMO there are too many variables to make assumptions from. Outside environment - hot climate vs cold climate, Manual vs Tiptronic - we've already been told that tiptronics suffer more, driving style, fuel choice, service intervals, etc, may all affect chances of it happening. And until we get the specialists revealing all, we won't know for sure what can affect it.
anonymous said:
[redacted]
Far from it actually, but we don't really have any other specialists providing input, sadly, so everyone re-quotes Baz - you yourself do it, so I think it's a tad unfair to accuse others as worshiping Hartech.I'm not looking for an Internet punch out here cmoose; we're all on the same side at the end of the day. We're both owners - you one who has first hand experience of a failure - who just want the accurate info. How about a virtual beer to cool things off?
It does feel that there are too many people posting speculation as fact on too many threads here though, and it does get annoying. Again, not saying that your post did that, btw, just that if there was something I had missed that supported your comments, I would like to know about it.
Changing the topic slightly, did you buy your car knowing that it had an issue (i.e good deal + warranty that you knew would sort it), or only find out about it after, as you seemed to be posting about problems quite soon after taking ownership? Did Porsche give you photos of the bores? Would be interesting to see what sort of state they were in if so.
Edited by ChipsAndCheese on Tuesday 18th November 18:47
ChipsAndCheese said:
Genuinely curious to know what evidence you have to prove this. Or are you just going by what you have heard on here and elsewhere on the Internet?
Welcome to pistonheads. The porsche forum here reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon strip 'Ignorance…will fuel rumours that get repeated until they morph into common knowledge' Edited by ChipsAndCheese on Tuesday 18th November 17:15
jimmy p said:
It makes you wonder why previous owner of your car didn't get the car fixed under warranty themselves if the oil consumption was so apparent straight away??
Was it under warranty for the previous owner?No doubt plenty of people are offloading these with the issue present.
northernmedia said:
Was it under warranty for the previous owner?
No doubt plenty of people are offloading these with the issue present.
I think this is what skews the risk. I believe that there are a many distress sales. No doubt plenty of people are offloading these with the issue present.
Whatever the risk is of a failure, the risk of purchasing an iminent or progressing failure is higher.
s off! 
What me? You want to know what Causes Bore Scoring? and who to believe? - there is no easy answer. We always try to avoid directly naming and arguing with our competitors because it is difficult enough to manage this type of problem with no support from the manufacturer and in our view anyone who is trying to assist owners in difficulty with the products we make our living from deserves to be left alone doing their best without us interfering directly. I think the only time we have zoned in is indirectly when as a result of 50 years appreciation that fitted iron or steel liners are not ideal for this type of high performance sports car - we started receiving engines that have already been fitted with them and failed . Even then we still didn't mention the businesses involved directly but of course the manufacturers of the liners and businesses fitting them were not happy and some (perhaps understandably) hit back at us. I also prefer not to generate arguments with other specialists who are otherwise doing a good job over trivial issues that armchair engineers know very little about but would enjoy fuelling.
Humans still have a fantastic capacity for drawing the right answer from fragments of clues - providing they have enough general knowledge and experience (still faster and better than computers). The more experiences they have of related subjects and examples and the better they are at managing them - the better they can become at solving such problems.
The difficulty is when there is no easy way to know who to believe and trust. In manufacturing it is hard to distinguish between exaggerated claims and real benefits and products - but one place that demonstrates who is good at doing this is in sports engineering - where often an individual or small group intimately involved in the whole sphere of their sport can deduce and solve engineering problems better than massive competitors full of individual specialists that lack the direction from one person to put it all together and are hampered by departmental competitiveness, politics and empire building. This is why many large F1 teams are actually run from relatively small and separate specialists and why consultants have taken over many problem solving roles.
These two facts combined mean that you should have more confidence in people that can get to the front in competitive motor sport and who have the largest number of experiences and history of similar product improvements than others - of which we at Hartech must rate at the very top in our specialist Porsche sphere.
The other alternative is to use logic and try to find correlations and explanations for them.
Let's imagine a spreadsheet with the M96 and M97 models across the top in chronological order and the well known problems down the page!
We would start with a 2.5 Boxster across the top moving on to the 2.7. 3.2 Boxster S etc and right across to a 997 3.8 on the right hand side.
Downwards we could list things like IMS bearing failures, bore ovality, head cracks, bore scoring, piston coating type, fuel type used.
Each cell could then represent something - say red for a serious problem and green for OK, blue for "only affects bank 2" and dark colours if it is a common problem with lighter colours if it is rare.
When fully completed - if you stood back you would see a colourful pattern emerge and not a random distribution and this is similar to how our brains work out influences.
The IMS failure cells would be dark red for all the models with the different versions of the smaller bearings and green for the later engines with the larger bearings - creating an obvious conclusion that the original small bearings were the main problem.
If we picture say bore ovality (leading to excessive piston clearances and cracking) the LHS with the 2.5 and 2.7 Boxster would be dark green, the 3.2 Boxster S light green (it takes a lot of racing to eventually result in a few cracking), and from the 3.4 engines upwards it would be dark red. The correlation would be that the 2.5 and 2.7 Boxsters have thicker cylinder walls and less strain as they are less powerful - whereas as the engine size (power and strain) increases so the wall thickness reduces - making it possible to make a logical deduction as to the causes.
With cracked cylinder heads - just the 3.2 Boxsters and 3.4 996's would be light red (both made from the same casting - ref. pictures in our buyers guide showing sections and thin areas of weakness) the rest would be green.
So far no blue areas on the spreadsheet so both banks affected equally.
If we now come to bore scoring we would start to see the blue colours emerging.
But all the engines fitted with ferrous coated pistons would be green (this is all the engines from Boxster 2.5 up to most of the early 996 3.4 engines) - no bore scoring. All the engines made after the pistons coating was changed to a "plastic" coating would be BLUE (not RED including the last of the 996 3.4 engines, Cayman 3.4S and all larger engines with Lokasil cylinders) - because it only affects one side of the engine (bank 2).
The smaller engines with "plastic coated" pistons would be light blue (as they are not yet proving a problem but may do in the future) and we are just starting to get reports that some Gen 2 cars are starting to score - so they would be mid-blue and this adds an additional rider that the larger the capacity and power output the sooner the "plastic coated" pistons fail and the bores score.
These pictorial representations of tracing a problem are how engineers with experience and ability can manage to draw reliable conclusions from relatively small samples - although the better they are at problem solving and the more they sample the more reliable the results.
The obvious next question is - why do the only scored bores come from bank two? (allowing for the fact that actually bank 1 will score eventually it just probably lasts about 4 or 5 times longer than bank 2 before it becomes a problem by which time bank 2 has already scored and probably been fixed along with bank 1 for those able to afford it).
Let's look at this the other way around - if we could make bank 2 run exactly the same as bank 1 (no differences anywhere) would bank 2 still score bores so prematurely? you work out your own answer and if it is "NO" - how can the cause be the same fuel that is being supplied to both banks?
The differences all relate to the temperatures around the cylinder block where the coolant enters both blocks at the bottom (and exits from the top), the proportion of that coolant has been severely reduced (compared to the head flow) and the thermostat rating that has been raised, but the thrust face (where all the scoring occurs) is on the bottom of bank 1 and the top of bank 2 resulting in the temperature of the piston and cylinder at the thrust face being hotter on bank2 than bank 1.
Hotter temperatures lead to thinner oil and reduce the oil film thickness, viscosity and support separating the piston from the cylinder wall while also running the piston plastic coating at a higher temperature on the thrust face of bank 2 (and plastics lose hardness and bonding strength as temperatures rise which ferrous electroplating does not and is already twice as hard as plastic anyway).
The combination of these factors with one other similar influence that we are not reporting on yet - result in bank 2 scoring long before bank 1 might.
But bank 2 cannot be made to run exactly the same as bank 1 - but anything that can make it run more like bank 1 is therefore beneficial. We therefore we need to consider, measure, test and establish what the differences actually are that might encourage bore scoring - and if we can change any of them to run more like bank 1 does.
We have been doing all this for many years including fitting temperature sensors inside several engines and altering radiator sizes and thermostat positions and settings and this has resulted in us creating our LTT and altering the coolant balance between the banks and the heads.
The addition of a third radiator seems a logical additional benefit but is only so at very high ambient conditions and hard driving whereas on cooler days and more steady driving it can make the inside of the engine run even hotter (previously discussed, explained and proven under test)
Recently we managed to develop a method of replicating the bank 1 temperatures inside bank 2 while managing the addition of a third radiator effectively in all conditions, but a heavy existing workload and the design, manufacture and installation of new tooling has delayed availability.
These are designed to enable engines not yet scored to last much longer and will be fully explained and hopefully available in the early New Year.
Going back to the start and trying to help you decide who and what to believe - all the above should help and describes how people that are good at solving similar engineering problems think, work, deduce causes and develop solutions.
We speak to all our customers in great detail about the circumstances leading up to their problem and various issues relating to their driving, type of fuel used, previous servicing schedules, oil used manual or tiptronic etc. There are huge variations but this is the benefit of carrying out far more of these engine rebuilds than anyone else - for longer - that the data base of answers in the spreadsheet in our engineers minds enables them to process more options and causes than anyone with less experience and volume while our considerable success on the track demonstrates that our ability to deduce the right causes from such data and answers is very high indeed.
It is certainly likely to be more reliable than the contribution of self confessed armchair "engineers" who for some reason take a dislike to anyone who actually knows what they are talking about and seem to take every opportunity to criticise others.
Finally (and just for the record) there are several Cayman S cars with 24K mileages and above for sale at around the price of ours. They have the standard original engine that is therefore more likely to fail than ours that is not only the subject of a top rebuild but also has all the right changes to make it better than new. The car is manual and superb and has had our full sales preparation (including many other new parts) and comes complete with automatic entry into our Lifetime Maintenance Plan. This means the engine is not only covered fully for 24K or 24 months but is also covered for the cost of labour for the rest of its life (if the owner so chooses - no mileage age or cost limits) as are all the other wear and tear parts and all for £48/month +Vat (3k/annum) or £66/month +Vat (10K/annum) - which also covers the full cost of scheduled services (parts and labour) and an annual Mot (so you get most if not all of that cost back making the free labour guarantee element effectively free - oh and you can stop whenever you want without penalty.
For interest among present rebuilds we have 5 Cayman S cars/engines in and another Cayman S car we are in the process of buying with more average mileage that will be less expensive. This is not a new "sideline" as we have been selling Porsche's for almost 20 years but we did back off initially when the reports started coming through of engines starting to go wrong and then needed the space to store cars with engines removed for rebuild and had little space to stock sale cars.
Our premises are currently being enlarged to provide more storage space and as a result we hope to return to more car sales soon. Meanwhile - it does help owners that cannot afford to repair them (or perhaps don't want to) that we might offer to buy them and prepare them for sale. This avoids rebuilds being anything less than the very best we can do (with all the future proofing possible, 6 new Nikasil alloy liners etc etc) - while providing sale cars with the highest specification of engine rebuilds, guarantees and Maintenance cover that we are more confident to sell and that suits some buyers wanting to start out with a great car that will not go wrong and can be looked after for the rest of their ownership for a modest cost by people they trust - and as a result they are always in demand.
Now I need a lie down after writing all this and you probably do to after reading it! I hope it has helped.
Baz
Humans still have a fantastic capacity for drawing the right answer from fragments of clues - providing they have enough general knowledge and experience (still faster and better than computers). The more experiences they have of related subjects and examples and the better they are at managing them - the better they can become at solving such problems.
The difficulty is when there is no easy way to know who to believe and trust. In manufacturing it is hard to distinguish between exaggerated claims and real benefits and products - but one place that demonstrates who is good at doing this is in sports engineering - where often an individual or small group intimately involved in the whole sphere of their sport can deduce and solve engineering problems better than massive competitors full of individual specialists that lack the direction from one person to put it all together and are hampered by departmental competitiveness, politics and empire building. This is why many large F1 teams are actually run from relatively small and separate specialists and why consultants have taken over many problem solving roles.
These two facts combined mean that you should have more confidence in people that can get to the front in competitive motor sport and who have the largest number of experiences and history of similar product improvements than others - of which we at Hartech must rate at the very top in our specialist Porsche sphere.
The other alternative is to use logic and try to find correlations and explanations for them.
Let's imagine a spreadsheet with the M96 and M97 models across the top in chronological order and the well known problems down the page!
We would start with a 2.5 Boxster across the top moving on to the 2.7. 3.2 Boxster S etc and right across to a 997 3.8 on the right hand side.
Downwards we could list things like IMS bearing failures, bore ovality, head cracks, bore scoring, piston coating type, fuel type used.
Each cell could then represent something - say red for a serious problem and green for OK, blue for "only affects bank 2" and dark colours if it is a common problem with lighter colours if it is rare.
When fully completed - if you stood back you would see a colourful pattern emerge and not a random distribution and this is similar to how our brains work out influences.
The IMS failure cells would be dark red for all the models with the different versions of the smaller bearings and green for the later engines with the larger bearings - creating an obvious conclusion that the original small bearings were the main problem.
If we picture say bore ovality (leading to excessive piston clearances and cracking) the LHS with the 2.5 and 2.7 Boxster would be dark green, the 3.2 Boxster S light green (it takes a lot of racing to eventually result in a few cracking), and from the 3.4 engines upwards it would be dark red. The correlation would be that the 2.5 and 2.7 Boxsters have thicker cylinder walls and less strain as they are less powerful - whereas as the engine size (power and strain) increases so the wall thickness reduces - making it possible to make a logical deduction as to the causes.
With cracked cylinder heads - just the 3.2 Boxsters and 3.4 996's would be light red (both made from the same casting - ref. pictures in our buyers guide showing sections and thin areas of weakness) the rest would be green.
So far no blue areas on the spreadsheet so both banks affected equally.
If we now come to bore scoring we would start to see the blue colours emerging.
But all the engines fitted with ferrous coated pistons would be green (this is all the engines from Boxster 2.5 up to most of the early 996 3.4 engines) - no bore scoring. All the engines made after the pistons coating was changed to a "plastic" coating would be BLUE (not RED including the last of the 996 3.4 engines, Cayman 3.4S and all larger engines with Lokasil cylinders) - because it only affects one side of the engine (bank 2).
The smaller engines with "plastic coated" pistons would be light blue (as they are not yet proving a problem but may do in the future) and we are just starting to get reports that some Gen 2 cars are starting to score - so they would be mid-blue and this adds an additional rider that the larger the capacity and power output the sooner the "plastic coated" pistons fail and the bores score.
These pictorial representations of tracing a problem are how engineers with experience and ability can manage to draw reliable conclusions from relatively small samples - although the better they are at problem solving and the more they sample the more reliable the results.
The obvious next question is - why do the only scored bores come from bank two? (allowing for the fact that actually bank 1 will score eventually it just probably lasts about 4 or 5 times longer than bank 2 before it becomes a problem by which time bank 2 has already scored and probably been fixed along with bank 1 for those able to afford it).
Let's look at this the other way around - if we could make bank 2 run exactly the same as bank 1 (no differences anywhere) would bank 2 still score bores so prematurely? you work out your own answer and if it is "NO" - how can the cause be the same fuel that is being supplied to both banks?
The differences all relate to the temperatures around the cylinder block where the coolant enters both blocks at the bottom (and exits from the top), the proportion of that coolant has been severely reduced (compared to the head flow) and the thermostat rating that has been raised, but the thrust face (where all the scoring occurs) is on the bottom of bank 1 and the top of bank 2 resulting in the temperature of the piston and cylinder at the thrust face being hotter on bank2 than bank 1.
Hotter temperatures lead to thinner oil and reduce the oil film thickness, viscosity and support separating the piston from the cylinder wall while also running the piston plastic coating at a higher temperature on the thrust face of bank 2 (and plastics lose hardness and bonding strength as temperatures rise which ferrous electroplating does not and is already twice as hard as plastic anyway).
The combination of these factors with one other similar influence that we are not reporting on yet - result in bank 2 scoring long before bank 1 might.
But bank 2 cannot be made to run exactly the same as bank 1 - but anything that can make it run more like bank 1 is therefore beneficial. We therefore we need to consider, measure, test and establish what the differences actually are that might encourage bore scoring - and if we can change any of them to run more like bank 1 does.
We have been doing all this for many years including fitting temperature sensors inside several engines and altering radiator sizes and thermostat positions and settings and this has resulted in us creating our LTT and altering the coolant balance between the banks and the heads.
The addition of a third radiator seems a logical additional benefit but is only so at very high ambient conditions and hard driving whereas on cooler days and more steady driving it can make the inside of the engine run even hotter (previously discussed, explained and proven under test)
Recently we managed to develop a method of replicating the bank 1 temperatures inside bank 2 while managing the addition of a third radiator effectively in all conditions, but a heavy existing workload and the design, manufacture and installation of new tooling has delayed availability.
These are designed to enable engines not yet scored to last much longer and will be fully explained and hopefully available in the early New Year.
Going back to the start and trying to help you decide who and what to believe - all the above should help and describes how people that are good at solving similar engineering problems think, work, deduce causes and develop solutions.
We speak to all our customers in great detail about the circumstances leading up to their problem and various issues relating to their driving, type of fuel used, previous servicing schedules, oil used manual or tiptronic etc. There are huge variations but this is the benefit of carrying out far more of these engine rebuilds than anyone else - for longer - that the data base of answers in the spreadsheet in our engineers minds enables them to process more options and causes than anyone with less experience and volume while our considerable success on the track demonstrates that our ability to deduce the right causes from such data and answers is very high indeed.
It is certainly likely to be more reliable than the contribution of self confessed armchair "engineers" who for some reason take a dislike to anyone who actually knows what they are talking about and seem to take every opportunity to criticise others.
Finally (and just for the record) there are several Cayman S cars with 24K mileages and above for sale at around the price of ours. They have the standard original engine that is therefore more likely to fail than ours that is not only the subject of a top rebuild but also has all the right changes to make it better than new. The car is manual and superb and has had our full sales preparation (including many other new parts) and comes complete with automatic entry into our Lifetime Maintenance Plan. This means the engine is not only covered fully for 24K or 24 months but is also covered for the cost of labour for the rest of its life (if the owner so chooses - no mileage age or cost limits) as are all the other wear and tear parts and all for £48/month +Vat (3k/annum) or £66/month +Vat (10K/annum) - which also covers the full cost of scheduled services (parts and labour) and an annual Mot (so you get most if not all of that cost back making the free labour guarantee element effectively free - oh and you can stop whenever you want without penalty.
For interest among present rebuilds we have 5 Cayman S cars/engines in and another Cayman S car we are in the process of buying with more average mileage that will be less expensive. This is not a new "sideline" as we have been selling Porsche's for almost 20 years but we did back off initially when the reports started coming through of engines starting to go wrong and then needed the space to store cars with engines removed for rebuild and had little space to stock sale cars.
Our premises are currently being enlarged to provide more storage space and as a result we hope to return to more car sales soon. Meanwhile - it does help owners that cannot afford to repair them (or perhaps don't want to) that we might offer to buy them and prepare them for sale. This avoids rebuilds being anything less than the very best we can do (with all the future proofing possible, 6 new Nikasil alloy liners etc etc) - while providing sale cars with the highest specification of engine rebuilds, guarantees and Maintenance cover that we are more confident to sell and that suits some buyers wanting to start out with a great car that will not go wrong and can be looked after for the rest of their ownership for a modest cost by people they trust - and as a result they are always in demand.
Now I need a lie down after writing all this and you probably do to after reading it! I hope it has helped.
Baz
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