The best gifts to the man who raised you should be thoughtful, kind, and cutting and grim reminders of dead cars they loved and held near and dear. NASCAR driver and Friend of Jalopnik Parker Kligerman gave his dad just that kind of perfect gift this past Father’s Day, with a framed chunk of the engine piece that grenaded his dad’s Porsche.
The intermediate shaft, or IMS bearing, in old Porsche Boxsters and 996-generation 911s is infamous for its tendency to fail, and fail spectacularly, taking the whole engine down with it, as reader burglar can’t heart click anything noted a few years back:
All Boxsters / Caymans / 911s from 1999-2008 (except the turbo and GT3 models) had some version of this. The cams are driven off of an intermediate shaft, and instead of a pressure fed oil bearing like in older motors Porsche used a sealed ball bearing.
Worked fine if a car was regularly driven preferably hard, and maintained on schedule. But if a car sat, or oil temps didn’t get nice and hot on occasion, corrosion would start to form and they’d eat themselves. Which would drop timing chains, and the whole motor would melt down. Very rare problem, but happened.
Porsche in their infinite wisdom went to a weaker smaller bearing in 2000, which failed much more easily.
They left it like that until 2006, where they went to the final solution - a slightly larger bearing that could no longer be serviced.
In 2009 they removed IMS bearing completely with the 9A1 motor redesign.
And that’s pretty much exactly what happened to Parker’s dad’s Porsche 911 convertible. So to honor him and his beloved, dead car, Parker made him this for Father’s Day:
We asked Parker how he got a Porsche IMS bearing framed, and apparently it’s the sort of thing you gotta do yourself. He went to his local art supplies store, got everything necessary, and even glued the Objet Trouvé to the front of it himself.
The best gifts are hilarious, and also crafted.