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Skoda 1.6 tdi timing tensioner failure Part one

This week was interesting. Having replaced this belt a couple of years ago on a Skoda Octavia 1.6 Diesel,the customer came in with a terrible noise. So it was time to investigate. As you can see from the pictures upon stripping it down I was horrified by what I saw.



As you can clearly see the bearing as totally failed. It was surprising to know this car was actually running. Totally amazed that it was running. 






You can see that the heat from the faulty bearing has over heated melting the plastic on the tensioner. Here you can see it after removal.







The obvious thing to do now was replace the timing belt kit using the correct Volkswagen  locking tools to see how it runs. OK so I will put you out of suspense. The car runs but makes a terrible noise. So unfortunately for the customer the Skoda will be stripped for further investigation. I have no doubt there will be internal damage but I expected this anyway. 

I will follow up with this in a future post and will try and add a few photos too. Please feel free to comment to contribute to this blog. 

So, this has been an absolute nightmare. After removing the cylinder head, which is a huge job that’s time consuming and difficult. I checked all the valves and to my amazement there was no damage. So  it was time to rebuild. After completion I started the engine. Then ping engine MIL light illuminated with a horrible noise. 

My moral for the job was fading, really frustrated and beginning to doubt my work. After checking the fault codes it showed a timing correlation fault. 


So I stripped it back down AGAIN!! And rechecked my work. As you can see everything timed up perfectly. 





So what next?  It couldn’t be the sensors, the only thing it could be was the timing. 

Part2

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