jteuvonnent

Everything he found wrong with the car is a minor nuisance at best, except oil the leak in the Rear Main Seal area. The so called "Specialist" did not check the main thing that he was supposed to check on these - the VANOS (variable valve timing) health. There are diagnostic tools that can detect detect whether the IMS (Intermediate shaft) bearing is on its way out, because it affects the functioning of the VANOS.



Draining oil and looking for debris from a failing IMS bearing is a must when you do a pre-purchase inspection on any M96/M97 type engine. When (not if) the IMS grenades, you will need a replacement engine. You can get a rebuilt one from Germany, for more than the market value of a running 996, or a used one from a wreck. The only real solution to the IMS problem on these cars is to install a plain bearing and an oil line to



supply oil to it (a kit is available for this). It requires engine modification beyond what a typical DIYer will do. Every other solution is not permanent, but a band-aid. If the RMS is leaking at this day and age, chances are it will leak forever and there is absolutely nothing short of an engine replacement that can be done to fix it. Sure, you can replace the rear main seal with a new one. It may even stop leaking for some 30K miles if



you are lucky (or it will leak the next day if you are not). In their pursuit of weight savings, the engineers made the crankshaft cradle and cases somewhat weak, plus Porsche had problems with the quality of aluminum casting on these engines (some of them came with sleeves from the factory, on a brand new car!) Eventually, once the engine enough start/stop (warm up/cool down) cycles the aluminum will deform and the rear



main seal will be off-center with respect to the main bearings bore. Short of taking the engine completely apart and doing some impractically expensive machine work, there is really nothing you can do to fix the problem. Unfortunately the RMS leaking is sometimes and indicator of a more severe problem going on: once the crankshaft cradle is deformed, you may get one or more main bearings that become too tight/off center.



This problem eventually causes catastrophic engine failure. So, yeah, if a Boxster or a 996 has a leaky RMS, you should treat that car as a very expensive lottery ticket. Personally I don't work on these cars any more, even though I used to do it a lot. Their market value has gone down so much, they are not worth the effort. There are better handling and faster cars that can be had for less money.