JFP in PA

TC. PSM and ABS false indications are very often voltage related (weak battery, alternator, bad grounds, etc.). Get the car scanned with a Porsche specific system, and if there are no codes active or pending, start looking at your electrical system.

Suggest doing a search, topic has been beaten to death.

OK: Pan gasket: 955 397 016 00 Filter: 955 307 403 00 Filter Gasket: 955 325 443 00 Drain and fill plug gaskets: 955 321 181 01 & 955 321 379 00

Preemptive change? By that mileage you should be at the end your second service already. We never let them go beyond 40-50K. That said, the reason your dealer does not sell very many filters or pan gaskets is the price they are charging for them. You can do much better in the after market or online. We like to pull the pan to see what residue or debris has collected. We stay with "super DOT 4" brake fluids and use ATE as our standard fill. Yes, you need to get the vehicle as level as possible to correctly fill the transfer case. Doesn't have to be perfect, but it needs to be at least close to level.

LN uses their own design flange for a couple of reasons. If you take a car apart and it has an LN flange in it, and you do not have any owner's records to document what was installed, pull the bearing out and you will know exactly what you are dealing with. If you are not a shop holding inventory, you will be far better off paying FedEx overnight charges on the correct bearing than having a $600 paperweight you are trying to sell at a discount on fleabay.

Which is why you should always pull the existing bearing out if you have any questions about which style it is.

I hope it will as I do not really see your point.

If you look at the photos I posted in post #11 above, the factory single and dual row flange covers are entirely different and very easy to visually discern; the dual row flange is nearly flat in the center while the single row flange is deep with sloping sides. We have never had to measure one, just a quick peek tells you what you are dealing with.

You have the wrong switch, the 97-03 cars use one switch: 2004 and later use a different one:

You are going have to fabricate some bits to do this; on a Porsche, the water normally flows from the radiators towards the engine thermostat housing, so you want to disconnect the hose coming off the thermostat housing and make up some fittings to connect a hose into the car's hose. Then remove the thermostat and housing assembly. Now run the water into the hose, thru the front radiators, back to the water pump and engine, and out the thermostat housing. You want to be able to "throttle' the water pressure (house systems can have as much as 90 PSIG water pressure, the car is only rated for 20 PSIG and you can damage some very expensive parts if you over pressure the car). We do this with a system we built that uses a pump to push water from a heated reservoir into the car at 20 PSIG, thru the system and back into the reservoir thru a stainless filtering screen to catch the bits. You don't need to be that fancy, but I think you get an idea what is involved.

My reference says the OEM plugs for your 3.4L are Beru 14 -gr-6-kqu, which should cross reference to a Bosch FGR6KQE, so you are running a bit too cold. Black velvety or sooty looking plugs are a sign of an overly rich condtion, so if a hotter plug does not clean up, I would start looking at your intake system for reasons why.

Yeah you are probably right, looks like my internet balls were a bit fierce last night, now how do I delete those posts? I am really just trying to understand whether it was a dodgy install, the product or another factor that just happened to be solved. If it was the camshaft timing that was off, it would suggest to me that someone did not install the product properly, allowing for some play with the IMS. It is of course very difficult to confirm any conclusions without being there and working on the actual car yourself. Actually, the VarioCam is oil pressure operated, so depriving it of either volume or pressure can make it bounce around wildly, so the bearing could have been still running true. Low oil delivery to one head would also cause all kinds of lifter related noise. But before anything could be determined, animosity and defense mechanism's set in and shop doing the remedial work got pissed off and clammed up and stopped posting, so any opportunity to learn something was completely lost. If you look at the "edit" related buttons under your post, there is a "delete" button.

I'm genuinely glad to hear that, but you need consider that as with any complicated technology, you always need to pay attention to the "outlier" incidents, even if they are relatively small in numbers. When the original OEM IMS failures started, a lot of credible people brushed them aside as well, as did Porsche. It was only with the passing of time and the collection of more data that the true magnitude of the issue surfaced, and growing legal pressures forced Porsche to admit that the problem claimed as many as 10% of all single row design engines, at a cost of over $15K each. Always keep an open mind in these matters, being overly judgmental only ultimately blinds you to the true facts.

We prefer the Wix/NAPA Gold 51042 filter, or the 51042XP with synthetic filter media. Both are found at many auto parts stores as well as online.

OK soooooo.... can you quantify what the "valve train issues" were, and how exactly the problems were solved (perhaps by explaining the problems you experienced), sounds like BS to be honest, seriously tell the truth, you were making this up right? I can follow up on this. The DOF install was done by an unknown shop, but the car owner encountered poor running conditions and noise coming from the engine. Apparently after other people had looked at it without any success, the owner took the car to a small, but respected shop that specialized in Porsche work, including race cars. There, the shop owner's son diagnosed the noise as coming from the valve train, and also scanned the car and found the VarioCam timing was jumping around. Just out of curiosity, he disconnected and plugged the oil feed line on the DOF system, and all the problems stopped. Surmising the oil feed system was the source of the noise and cam timing issues, he then pulled the entire DOF system out of the car and installed one of LN's Solution systems that feeds the oil to the solid IMS bearing replacement from the spin on oil filter adaptor rather than one of the cylinder heads like the DOF, and the car ran perfectly, and went back into service with no further problems. Interestingly, when the shop reported what they had seen and done on the website of one of the principal's of the DOF system, he was immediately barraged with comments like yours implying that he was a liar, the entire event was made up, that he should have done more work experimenting to find out what was wrong with the DOF and fixing it, etc.. The shop responded that they had done the appropriate diagnostics, isolated and replace the problematic components and gotten the car back on the road trouble free, which is what shops do. After more heated accusations, the shop posted that they would no longer be reporting such issues like this as all it did was generate inappropriately negative commentary about them. If you want to know more about the incident, do a search as the thread on this was rather extensive, if a bit overheated and accusatory, and became a sad commentary on what happens when blind allegiance and emotions overtake the facts in a situation.

Be careful using air pressure, these systems are only designed to operate at pressure just below 20 PSIG, and it is very easy to go way over that using compressed air. We have had customer's blow the side tanks off the front radiators doing this.

Transmission flushing systems are common here as well (including the BG brand), and do a great job of getting all the fluid out of the torque converter as well as the transmission. Only problem is that most of these system connect to the external transmission cooler (usually in the radiator) via the cooler lines; and on many Porsche models, there are no cooler lines as the cooler is mounted directly on the transmission case side: The only lines coming off the Tip cooler are coolant lines, not fluid, so you would have to remove the cooler itself and bolt an adaptor in its place to accomplish a flush, and that would not be very easy on many Porsche models as there is no room to do this. This is one of many reasons we suggest shortening the factory service intervals on the Tips to a max of 40-50K rather than 90K, this way you are changing out as much fluid as possible more frequently. I would love to see a quality system to flush the Tips in the cars, but to date have not seen one that I like.

As that fuse protects the power circuit in the radio itself, the radio is probably on its way out. Perhaps time to accelerate your replacement plans.

Not entirely sure, but shouldn't one flush the entire cooling system by two different directions just to maximize the chances that all foreign parts come out from those small cooling channels? This is actually quite easy to do as the big coolant tubes are easily accessible underneath the car. Would hate to see myself that much later some cyl is running a lot hotter than the others. Perhaps more experienced persons should comment to this. I would suggest flushing it backwards to normal flow to try and dislodge any bits that have found a home. You should be able to recover a lot of the impeller bits, but you will never get all of them.

1. Yes. 2. No idea, never tried to rebuild them, usually replaced.

Congratulations, and welcome to RennTech ! :welcome:

Nice write up.

No, I would look for a qualified independent as they should be much cheaper and know the car, check with your local PCA chapter, I'm sure they have a list of preferred shops in your area.

JFP is me, IMHO is "In my humble opinion".

While the factory service interval is 90K miles, we normally do them at 40-50K in the shop, plus from 1998 to 2014 is a long time for any fluid to be in a car. As there is no dipstick for the Tip trans (it is a long story on how to check it, but you can find DIY instruction's if you search on this site), so the car will need to be warm, up in the air, and level to check the fluid level, which is done through one of two openings in the pan on the bottom of the transmission. If you do not have service records for the car, a complete drain and new filter would be a good starting point. You might also want to get the transmission scanned with a Porsche specific scan tool to see if their are any active or pending transmission codes after you get it serviced.