Green Bits in Oil Filter

Curious to get some opinions here - 3/98 Build 1999 996.1 C2 - Manual Transmission - 135k miles I did an oil change recently and found just a few small green plastic bits in my oil filter. I have a Foxwell NT350 and found my cam deviations at -4 and -4. Is this from my chain guides? Or something else? Also - how hard is this type of thing to do myself? I'm fairly competent - I did my alternator, starter motor, y-cable and a few others things myself, but I did take my car to a local Porsche specialist to do the clutch and IMS and UAOS. I've done quite a bit of searching here and it seems to vary on what this could be (Cam guides, chain guides, variocam actuators, etc.), and the skill level required to do these things. Or - do I just keep driving the car and not sweat this?

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Drop the sump and see what's in there. You can reuse the oil you just put in.

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That's the funny thing - I did drop the sump on my last oil change and couldn't find any of the bits in there. Seems like they all got caught in the filter. Feels like I'm on the very beginning of some green colored rubber or plastic bit just starting to degrade a bit.

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Green bits mean 1 thing, cam actuator orings are crumbling. After 25+ years can't really blame them. Difficult to get to with engine in the car, and semi difficult to corectly rebuild with the Hartech o-ring kit for $150. Or at $1700 each, kind of expensive to change out new. Its one of the 10 plagues the m96 suffers from that really needs engine out for ease of repair for the diy guy in home garage on quick jacks. Then once engine is out you got all the 'while I'm in there stuff'. But, at 4� out, you've got till 6� to be out of spec. As long as its driving good, you've maybe got a while till a code pops up. I'd say drive it and keep an eye on it.

Im thinking Variocam actuators. I had green bits in mine a while back and it was one of the actuators, I forget which bank. I paid my indy shop to do it, since they warrantied the work and if it wasnt done right they would have to fix it. Been all good since. My indy said you can do it without taking the engine all the way out, just lowered a bit. And thats what he did.

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What was the damage for doing this type of work, just curious?

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Actuator was $1491 and the labor was $1485. You can find a new OEM actuator for less, but the shop wouldnt warranty the work unless they got the part from their source.

It's your Variocam actuator. If you did not recognize the symptoms (green bits), you probably are not going to be able to tackle this yourself. Drive it until it throws a CEL and then bring it in for service.

Read this https://rennlist.com/forums/996-foru...numbers-3.html The bits of the disintegrating o-ring can cause the electric solenoid of the variocam actuator to no longer being able to switch/extend, rendering the variocam disabled and stuck in its then current position. This will throw a specific code and is different from the one that indicates greater than 6 deg of cam deviation. The latter being only caused by wear of the variocam chain guides (and being at 4 deg currently, it will be a while until that pops up). Either code will prompt a repair of the variocam on that bank to which the code points. I will add to the thread linked above, what I found upon disassembly of my bank 2 variocam.

Thanks for all of the insight!