Cheers all...
So... as you have all gathered I have had a rod failure on my engine... I had developed a vibration during hard acceleration on my way to Bills this morning so drove the car gingerly until I could get a decent look at what may be the cause... initial thoughts were either the DMF which has been making noises for a little while now or maybe the Haldex clutch..
Later in the morning I took the car out down the road to see if I could work out where the vibration was coming from and having literally just got out of Bills gate the vibration started so I turned around and made my way back just making it through Bills gate before the engine stalled out...
That was a little concerning... gingerly restarted the engine where I immediately turned it off again after hearing a rather nasty knocking noise... and a nice little puddle...
Pushed the car into the workshop and on to the ramp where I whipped off the sump...
And of course the obligatory hole in the block shot..
Disappointing...
Checking the logs revealed no unusual events leading to the demise of the rod... there were a fair few fault codes relating to crank/cam correlation which made me initially think the belt had slipped and cause a series of events leading to rod failure..
After further investigation this little lot was just down to the crank trigger ring being hit (assumedly by the piston) and had flattened it enough to cause mistriggers...
I pulled the plugs out which looked perfect and stuck a bore scope down to see if there was anything obvious and couldn't see anything embedded into the crowns or any other obvious damage... feeling a little more relaxed about it all now as it seems that cyls 1,2 and 3 are ok and 4's damage may be limitied to the block and rod...
The remaining part of the rod on 4 rotates smoothly with no other obvious signs of over heating or blueing... the piston on the underside has marks but difficult to see how bad they all are..
Best case scenario seems to be replacement block (bored obvs), rods, piston + engine build stuff (shells, gaskets etc)
Its possible that the piston could be saved... but its also possible that there could have been contact between it and the valves
I plan to remove the head tomorrow and get a better idea of what the prognosis is...
Whats needed to get the engine running again will dictate where I go with the repair... it maybe that the cost of repair could be better served being put towards a VR swap... the value of the salvageable parts of my engine would help soften the blow of that
I know I realistically should be leaping at the chance to go VR now and if the engine was actual toast then I'd be more inclined but as it stands its not as easy as that as I still need to find parts and time to do it as well as trying to find ramp time for the car in between Bills busy schedule...
As it stands I suspect the car may get dragged back home and SORN for a while but I will decide over the coming week which direction I will go...
One things for sure I am not ready to give up on her and do what everyone else tends to do and break her... I just can't bring myself to do that...
The Color MFA seemed to work ok though... so thats a bonus
<tuffty/>