Thursday, 15 March 2012 17:35

Servicing - The Factory Schedule vs JMG Schedule

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At JMG Porsche we offer two levels of servicing.

Your Porsche owners handbook/maintenance book details what servicing the factory recommend your Porsche recieves and when. However you might be better off with an improved schedule for servicing

Some background info..

I am Jon Mitchell, second generation obsessive technician and boss at JMG Porsche. I love what I do, I love every Porsche model ever made and like to think I know them inside and out.

We are quite fortunate that we are always busy at JMG, either servicing, diagnosing, repairing modifying or improving Porsche machinery, if anything, often we are too busy. So we do spend quite some time trying to find ways of making your Porsche more reliable, so we spend less time fixing it and therefore hopefully keeping our workload at manageable levels.

Another great thing about what we do, we get to meet a vast array of Porsche owners, and like to propagate a good relationship with our customers. I would go on to say many of our customers also become like old friends over the years. But for a customer to be a customer over the course of years, the car needs to be not only reliable, but also affordable, so we do work hard to find ways for a customer to save money in the short and long term, but never at the expense of reliability or value of the car.

The problem with the Porsche factory service schedule.

The factory service schedule was written with extensive testing of the car, but not years of extensive testing. Time takes its toll on everything, including your Porsche, sometimes in unexpected ways and in different ways with each Porsche model.

When the 996 and Boxster model was released over a decade ago, the service schedule mentions nowhere to inspect the oil filter for debris symptomatic of early stages of a failing intermediate shaft bearing to avoid a completely destroyed engine, or checking the part number on a coolant cap to make sure it is the very latest version to avoid coolant loss and overheating, to be honest, it does not mention many items across all the Porsche models ranging back as far as the 356. This is not a failing of Porsche, as there was no way they could have known to check for these or any number of other things that we learn to check for from experience of each model. Blindly following the Porsche service schedule can result in repairs being required which could have been avoided.

Every model as it ages has its own issues which need to be addressed outside of the factory Porsche schedule, so an improved schedule can save the customer money and inconvenience, while keeping the car in a tip top condition.

Spark plugs every year? Even if the car has not been used much?

Sometimes, the service schedule can include things which are a little over the top, especially for a car which does not cover the average of 12,000 miles per year! A good example would be changing the spark plugs every year on an air cooled Porsche 911. On a 964 the car has 12 spark plugs, 6 of which require removal of the exhaust system to access, from experience, and bearing in mind the higher standard of spark plugs in the last few years, the spark plugs need not be changed every year, even if you were to cover 12,000 miles. So the owner of an air cooled Porsche can make serious servicing with a revised service schedule, even more so if the car does not even cover 12,000 miles per year!

An optional solution, the JMG Signature Service.

So in 2010, I spent a great deal of time analysing in great detail every service schedule from Porsche for every model. I then analysed every model for the common causes of breakdowns and component failures and composed what we now call the JMG Signature Service.

While I was at it, I also built a database of both the factory schedules and the JMG Signature Services for every single Porsche model, allocated a time for every item along with parts costs so that we could accurately and fairly price every service for every model. A mamoth task, some would say I was completely crazy for the level of detail I included, but the result is that we can provide you the customer with an option for better servicing alternative as well standard Porsche servicing.

Add or remove items from your service, easily while knowing the exact implication to the price.

Not only this, but we can instantly tell you how long the service should take to perform, what is inlcuded and even allow you to customise the service your car recieves. This is especially important if your car has recently had work done requiring some service parts to be changed, or perhaps due to extremely low annual mileages you would like to drop some items which degrade with mileage rather than time. We can not only drop items, or upgrade any item, we can also instantly tell you how much less or extra it would cost!

A good example of the benefit of the signature service would also be the transmission fluid in tiptronic cars. The factory has specified various durations both in time and mileage for the fluid and the filter within the transmissions to be replaced. However we have found that beyond 48,000 miles or 4 years the fluid is too contaminated to effectively protect the transmission from an expensive failure. So in 48,000 mile and 4 yearly JMG Signature Services, the transmission fluid and filter is replaced, which in turn avoids thousands of pounds worth of repairs!

Everything in the factory schedule and more with the JMG Signature Service.

With the exception of spark plugs in air cooled Porsche models, the JMG Signature Service includes everything included in a factory service for that interval, but with the addition of additional inspection and adjustments, along with in some cases additional service items performed earlier than Porsche specified or in some cases Porsche never specified!

We offer both the Porsche and JMG Signature services.

Once we had performed a trial on the JMG Signature Services along with constant adjustments until we were sure it was perfect we were faced with an important question, keep the factory service schedule as an option as well as the Signature Service, or drop it. We decided that a customer needs to have the option, so we still offer the Porsche factory service.

Another option for cars which cover very low mileages.

In response to customer demands, JMG have also formulated a new service, we call it our "Core Service", or "Foundation service", the idea is that we perform an indepth inspection, covering everything from the Porsche schedule for your car, plus a number of other additional checks and adjustments that we have learnt from experience are recommended, as well as visually checking the condition of all parts which could be changed on any scheduled service and changing the oil and filter. The ideal thing about this is that the car is checked on a regular basis, and we will check the consumable parts such as spark plugs, air filters, pollen filters, gear oil, brake fluid, clutch fluid and fuel filter. If we discover any of these servicing consumables could do with replacement, we will ask you for permission at extra cost, so they only get changed when they need to be changed, rather than based on an age, when they may only be part way into their realistic service life.

Read 6720 times Last modified on Wednesday, 11 July 2012 16:17
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