Porsche 911 Intermediate Shaft Rebuild
If you recall when I finished my engine teardown and split the case, I was greeted by a damaged intermediate shaft.
Somehow the aluminum timing gear had busted a tooth and that tooth made its way out through an oil change without taking out any other major components along the way. The engine was otherwise humming along just fine.
Disassembly
The time had come to take it apart, clean it, and replace all the gears. The aluminum gear had to go and the timing chain sprockets likely had some wear on them and should be replaced while we were at it. The problem was the sprockets need to be pressed out to get to the bolted-on aluminum gear. Fortunately I knew someone with a 15 ton press.
First we took the snap rings off each sprocket.
Then we found some arbor plates that fit the sprockets perfectly.
We set everything up on the yuuge press.
The first sprocket came right off. The press probably never even knew it was there.
Then we flipped it over on the press and pushed off the other sprocket.
Now we had access to the bolts on the aluminum gear.
I took everything home and tore it apart. With the lock tabs and bolts off the gear slid off. On the flanged end of the shaft there was a little snap ring holding a little aluminum plug in the oil gallery. The other tiny snap ring on the far left butts against the driveshaft that connects the intermediate shaft to the oil pump.
Reassembly
I cleaned out the shaft oil gallery and replaced the plug. Reassembled everything with new gear, lock tabs, pressed-in sprockets, and snap rings.
I actually had to do the lock tabs twice because my daughters were running around the garage and I got distracted. I installed lock tabs that locked onto nothing. So yeah, if you have kids, make sure you focus on the critical task at hand!
Here is the assembled shaft. I taped off the oiling holes to keep crud out in the meantime.
With that, we had a second short-block subassembly complete. Next we will do the last engine case preparations and main bearing clearance checks to get ready to assemble and seal the case.