KevinGary

Fastidious is one word for it. My wife has another F Word for it when she describes how I maintain the car. Of course she follows her F word with the word crazy.

Audi still has the car. Since they are opening up the engine I am having them replace everything; the chains, the guides , adjusters, tensioners. When I pick it up I will ask them what turned out to be the problem and let everyone know what it was.

I have had the A6 TDI as a loaner and it is a wonderful car. I think I may be ordering one very shortly. Then I will have to decide if I am keeping the old car or selling it. If I sell it somebody is going to get a fastidiously maintained car for a relative bargain.

4Driver4

Er, let me fix that for you:

...or at least the guides.

squidix9

Measuring block 93 will indicate the phase of each cam.

You would be looking for a wandering phase from one bank but not the other. Or a significant difference from one bank to the other. A bad tensioner "may" show up as jumpy phase numbers. As the RPM increases phase should change smoothly too.

If you've ever looked at fuel trim, it's the same idea. Looking for differences from side to side and stability.

KevinGary

They removed the engine this morning. As of 11 this morning they have found three cracked guides and a broken elbow. I have no idea what is the "elbow". I am stopping by the dealer tomorrow morning to take some pictures and see everything for myself. I will post the news as I get it. Since they were still breaking down the engine when I spoke to them they may find additional troubled parts.

KevinGary

I stopped by the dealer this morning to take a look at the car. They removed the transmission and torque converter, but left the engine in the car. They also dropped the exhaust, removed the front tires and took the nose off of the car. The mechanic said that three of the guides were broken, including the upper guide and the lower guide. I forget the location of the third guide. He also said that the lower tensioner had gone bad. He suspects that the lower tensioner going bad is what caused the guides to go bad. He told me that despite having 140,000 miles that the chains had zero stretch. He laughed and said that maybe my 5,000 mile oil changes since new had something to do with that. At least based on my car it is not the chains that are the problem, it is instead the tensioner and perhaps the guides. Since I am incurring significant labor charges anyway, they are replacing all of the chains, tensioners, guides, seals, etc. When I pick up the car I will post about the results.

olikoli

...oh my...

ProtoFly

So far, the consensus is that the chains really aren't a 'wear item', in that they really don't stretch. I replaced my upper ones, only because I knew that the passenger side had been subjected to a specific additional stress of skipping a tooth when the tensioner plastic material was ejected into the sprocket.

Interesting that they pulled the transmission, but not the engine. For the 4.2, that's not the recommended removal method according to the Bentley, but 'dealer knows best' is, I suppose, the rule.

KevinGary

When I saw that they had pulled the transmission and torque converter out of the car I inquired what would the labor charge be for replacing the torque converter and they said it would only cost me the cost of the torque converter and there would be no labor charge. So I told them to replace the torque converter as well.