Well that wasn't so much fun...

[Dare]

Rounded out the hole in the oil drain plug on my Cayman. Tried to dremel a slot and back it out with a screwdriver; no go. Tried to get it to turn with a chisel and hammer; nope.

Lesson learned--when faced with a rounded out allen head go straight for the JB Weld and a sacrificial bit.

drain-plug-jbweld-small.jpg (259.08 KiB) Viewed 1671 times

drain-plug-jbweld-2-small.jpg (239.43 KiB) Viewed 1671 times

[Tom]

Yikes, not the Cayman you want to be messing anything up on, that's for sure. I did the exact same thing with JB weld maybe 25 years ago the first time I tried to get he 944 transaxle drain plug out. I tried oversized torx bits, chisel, slot, etc. The JB Weld was kind of a Hail Mary before more drastic measures, but it worked like a champ.

[Camplug]

My lesson learned was to replace the drain plug with each oil change. That aluminum socket hole last for at best two oil changes. The JB Weld is a good Idea. I had the brass fitting slip out of my old 68 VW Beetle carb on the highway almost 40 years ago. FIRE HAZARD! Once I limped it home JB Weld fixed it and is still holding today!

[dr bob]

On a few of the cars over the years including the Porsches. Find that the factory tightening torque is often excessive. The spec seems to be based on how much clamping pressure is needed on the washer to keep the fluid inside. Getting that metal-to-metal pressure seal seems to include a certain amount of galling of the sealing faces too, requiring new washers with every use to guarantee a new flat not-work-hardened sealing face. The factory torque seems to pull pretty hard on the threads too.

My solution has been to add some teflon pipe thread sealing paste to the threads and the sealing faces including the washer, then reduce the tightening torque by a quarter to a third. Yes, torque wrench for tightening. I happen to have a can-with-brush Oatey version that gets the duty here. I also have a large squeeze tube of slightly thinner paste. You can find it easily in card packs from Permatex and Loctite too at you favorite auto parts sources.

Besides the use on oil sump and gearbox plugs, the coolant galley drains on the block on the 928 benefit greatly from this method. For some reason, the actual torque spec in the WSM missed unit translation/conversion before it went to the printer, leaving more than a few blocks with broken bosses on the block from folks trying to remove a plug especially if it's been there a while. Same deal for other Porsche models? I can only surmise.

So far (30+ years...) no issues with seepage or stuck drains or worries about loosening on their own. Plus with the lubrication, there's no galling of the threads or the sealing faces.

Use your best judgement of course. Just sharing a solution that's done well for me for a long time.