Ims Bolts And Cap Upgrade

[ssp996]

Is there an upgrade available from Porsche for the Ims bolt and cap, (not the bearing), and does it help reinforce ims?

[Loren]

Depending on the year of your car - yes there is bolt and seal upgrades. These are for leaks not durability.

[Dharn55]

I did this upgrade on my 2000 last year. It included the IMS flange with the new seal, the three bolts that hold the flange and three or four bolts for the crankcase. It cost about $67 from Sunset as I remember. the only thing it really does is improve the seal if you have a leak. It does not really effect the bearing itself.

[JFP in PA]

Perhaps it is just me, by I find it difficult to believe that someone would get that far into the car and not replace the bearing assembly…………..

[Dharn55]

At the time I was working on fixing the intermix/cracked head, which everyone had told me could not be done. That I would have to replace the engine. Not being sure that the fix would work I did not want to spend another $700. Also in spring of 09 they were still working on the tool for extracting a dual row bearing. Now that the car is fixed (5,000+ miles on the fix) I wish the tool had been readily available and I had done the bearing upgrade.

Probably will do it in the next few months. I did the flange, removed the outer seal and checked the bearing which seemed good. I talked to Charles at LN recently and he said that if I removed the seal and checked the bearing he would advise pouting in a magnetic drain plug and then watching for any metal which a bad bearing would shed. With the seal on any fragments would be contained but with it removed the should show up on the magnetic plug. However I think I will do the upgrade soon as I only see the drain plug every 5,000 miles or so.

[Wayne R. Dempsey]

You can write volumes on the intermediate shaft bearing problems, and still not figure out what causes the exact problem. I have some ideas about this, but I wrote about 3000 words on the Pelican forum. The bottomline - I don't think that anyone really knows what causes this failure. I'm not a huge fan of removing the seal - I think that if the seal is removed you are introducing an environment to the bearing that it wasn't designed for. I studied bearing design when I was at MIT, but I can't quite remember much (that was about 15 years ago now), so take that at face value.

To answer your question, the center bolt is not replaceable unless you remove the bearing. Even then, it's not available as a separate part from Porsche, and the stock center nut is a bit weak due to the recess cut for the o-ring.

-Wayne