4 minute read
Dr. Strangelove, Sort of
ARTICLE WRITTEN AND SUBMITTED BY Chuck Snyder
Many of those reading this may be familiar with one of my favorite movies, “Dr. Strangelove, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb.” It is a black comedy by Stanley Kubrick with such famous lines as “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!” and “Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in ‘Vegas with all that stuff.”
This is an affliction peculiar to owners of 1997 – 2008 Boxsters, 996 Carreras and pre-2009 Caymans (or is that Caymen?). Anyway, if you have had or still have one of these cars you know about the dreaded Doomsday Device that is the IMS bearing. When it is triggered, it’s the end of your engine, full stop (literally). And your stereo won’t be playing “We’ll Meet Again, Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When.”
Now there are many opinions about what causes these under-engineered devices to fail. Some experts say the seal that holds the grease into the factory bearing deteriorates, allowing motor oil to wash out the grease causing the bearing to fail. Some say it is a weakness in the design of the bearing cage causing it to break. Others believe that the bearing is just not robust enough and can’t handle the loads it is subjected to over time. There is one school of thought that says all IMS bearings will fail eventually. Of course, that could probably be said of any part in the car, if you know what I mean. One knows these things because of the innumerable words written on the subject and the various claims made by those who manufacture replacement bearings. Suffice it to say, they may all be right. The problem is that no one knows when or why any specific IMS bearing will fail.
Case in point – my 2005 Boxster. It is worth remembering that there was a very large class action lawsuit over IMS failures and some thousands of owners got their cars repaired or got compensation for engine failures. I checked on this when I found out about the lawsuit. My car was deemed to fall outside the class of cars included, which was determined by engine number and known failure rates at the time of the suit. I verified this with one of the attorneys who was working on the lawsuit. She told me that cars not included had a failure rate of less than 1%. Keep in mind what Mark Twain said about statistics when you contemplate that, “Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.”
With all of this as a prelude, consider: last fall, with just over 60,000 miles on the car, the Doomsday Device went off. I thought I had been a good boy. I changed my oil with top flight synthetic, 5W40, by Castrol or Liqui Moly at least every 5000 miles, usually closer to 2500 miles in most instances. I religiously cut open my oil filter cartridge, spread it out completely and looked for the Dreaded Metal Shavings. Never found any. I had a magnetic drain plug and checked it for filings – Nada!! I kept the revs over 2000. I sent some of my used oil off to Blackstone for analysis after every change. The reports were invariably chipper, no undue metal or other chemicals in the oil. I had over 60,000 miles and no problems, which many pundits said I was home free. No reason to fear, right? The message from the Universe seemed clear - stop worrying and learn to love your IMS bearing.
So, I blithely, blissfully went along, driving my car, only worrying once in a while when I’d read of some other poor soul’s IMS tragedy. I drove the car here from northwest Washington State, solo, when we moved to Arizona. I drove it on a club tour to Payson, Mormon Lake and Flagstaff without care. After all, I had done everything right, hadn’t I?
I’m sure you can guess the rest. One morning while returning from the swimming pool at a leisurely 35 MPH the car began to miss, the Check Engine light came on, then it began to flash, then all hell broke loose. All in about 300 yards of driving. I was done for! The light now meant Change Engine. Pistons became intimately acquainted with valves. Timing chains ran off with wild abandon to who knows where. Cylinder walls didn’t fare too well, either. The only solution was to spring for a complete rebuild, which is an expensive proposition and involves a few stories of its own, most full of frustration, but best left to another day when sufficient Knob Creek is present to dull the pain.
And now I’m back on the road again, with a guaranteed (!?!) IMS replacement bearing made with rollers rather than balls, lubricated by the fine synthetic oil, and many thousands of simoleons poorer. What will I do differently? I guess I’ll change the oil every 5000 miles, cut open my oil filter, send a sample to Blackstone, cut a potato and rub it on the sump then bury it under a full moon (worked for warts, why not this?), and anything else I can think of. I’m open to ideas.
