Coil Pack 1 keeps blowing on 2000 S3

[MikeA3]

Can anyone shed any light on this?

My S3 keeps blowing the coil pack on cylinder 1 which is resulting in a misfire / erratic idle / cr@p accelleration etc,etc. I know there has been historic problems with the coil packs on the 1.8T engines but as I understand it, this was due to a bad design on the original coil packs which was later solved by a different design.

I had the car serviced 2 weeks ago after the check engine light came on and coild pack one had gone so they replaced all four coil packs (£100) as part of the service. Three days later the car had to go back into the garage as the exhaust manifold was going and the garage told me coil pack one had gone again so it was replaced, again.

Low and behold on the way home (2 miles @ under 30mph all the way) the engine light came back on and the car began to misfire again.

Before I book the car in and spend lots more £££'s yet again could anyone advise why a coil pack would keep blowing like this? a friend said it could be a compression or valve problem but I don't understand why this would cause the coil pack to fail?

Any help would be appreciated

Mike

 

[Stewart]

I have heard of problems similar to this due to spark plugs not being tightened properly and suffering from 'blow by' whereby extremely hot combustion gasses blow past the plug and overheat the coilpack which leads to failure...

If the plug on Number1 cylinder has been threaded then this could be causing it however it should be blatantly obvious by checking the coilpack...

 

[MikeA3]

Thanks Stewart,

I checked the coilpack last night and it didn't seem to be damaged, also I forgot to add that all the plugs were changed at the service as well as the coil packs

mike

 

[MikeA3]

Thought i'd post an update just in case anyone else suffers from this in the future.

I got the car back from the garage last night, they ran a compression test to se if there were any problems internally within the cylinder and it all came back ok.

The coil pack they had removed when I had the exhaust gasket replaced was tested on another car and worked absolutely fine, the mechanic showed me the ciol pack and it was perfect. He thought that the coil was shutting down due to excess heat generated from the spark plug so they have changed the spark plugs over to heat range colder ones and this seems (so far) to have solved the problem it's running on all 4 cylinders again and is a lot smoother than before.

Mike

 

[s3_tny]

Hi Mike :thumbsup:

do you know what colder spark plugs they used as my coil packs keep popping up

and the plugs are pretty new and tightness fine so may try changing them to see if it helps, also i've seen

somewhere that you can get brackets that hold the coil packs down to stop them blowing

 

[MikeA3]

Hi Tony,

They didn't tell me which brand they used, just that they were heat range colder plugs & to be honest, I don't think it's solved the problem entirely.

The engine check light hasn't come back on since they changed the plugs over but i've recently got a vag.com cable and have just run a diagnostic which has registered a missfire.

If you have access to vag.com it might be worth giving yours a scan to find out exactly whats wrong with it, failing that if your ever near epsom i can scan it for you?

Heres the error code that's been found after the vag.com scan :

Address 01: Engine
Controller: 8N0 906 018 J
Component: 1.8L R4/5VT 0003
Coding: 10710
Shop #: WSC 06435
WAUZZZ8LZ1A022838 AUZ7Z0Y1555903
3 Faults Found:
16684 - Random/Multiple Cylinder Misfire Detected
P0300 - 35-10 - - - Intermittent
16685 - Shareware Version. To Decode all DTCs
P0301 - 35-10 - Please Register/Activate - Intermittent
17658 - Shareware Version. To Decode all DTCs
P1250 - 35-00 - Please Register/Activate
Readiness: 0000 0000

Good luck and if you get your fixed can you let me know as i'm keen to get to the bottom of this

Mike