joemech

My wifes a4 belt let go while shifting. The motor cutout and she couldnt get it back in gear while in motion. She coasted into a parking lot and got the car towed to the dealer. The dealer then diagnosed it as a bad starter. Replaced the starter and proceded to shear the teeth off the belt around the crank pulley and munge the valve train. Now they want me to pay $4K to repair this... is this insanity or what?

Kinetic0510

4 grand??? o..m...GAWD!!!!!!

Dead

That sounds like BS. When her car died,would the engine turn over?

nick n

whether $$$$ is an issue or not.

joemech

They say that they put it back together and the car ran like crap. I asked if they cked leakage on each cylinder at TDC and the service rep says he knows nothing about engines and relys on the service tech. Unfortunate I got this info Fri. nite at 5pm. I now get to waste my time Monday morning with them going over their itemization of $4k. I costed out the parts $2.4k, so labor and machine shop must be $1.6k which represents 2 days.

joemech

Yes. The starter sounded fine. She said the car sounded funny. I was out of town until friday and this happened the weekend before.

Dead

If the starter went it out the car would not have died.

Sounds like the belt broke and they f'ked up on diagnosing the problem. Trying to get you to buy the starter and the labor on top of the T-Belt.


Sounds like the T-Belt was the initial problem. Your engine will bend the valves if that happens, which will mean it will not run and would spin over really fast because of the lack of compression. Some engines will barely touch the valves in such an event and my run if the belt is replaced but they would run poorly. I don't know if the 1.8 is such an engine. We know that if the belt breaks the valves hit the pistons , so I don't know why they would put a belt back on.

greg01

The belt tensioner is a known problem on these motors. There is a ball socket where the tensioner joins the pulley. This socket wears and comes apart, causing the belt to skip and internal motor damage is next.

Audi is well aware of this problem, and in fact has a timing belt "kit" which contains a new style tensioner which does not use a ball socket (part # 058 198 479).

They should cover 50%-100% of the repair. Bring it to a dealer for diagnosis, and then call the customer service line and complain like hell about the following:

1. Tensioner is a known problem
2. Belt failed before recomended replacement interval.

Best of luck,

Greg

joemech

That is what I asked on friday, why would you waste the time to put the belt back in and attempt to run the vehicle? They should have put a degree wheel on both and hand rotated to each cyl. to tdc and checked cylinder leakage.