I recently purchased an A4 S-line Quattro at an auction and found out there was a hole in the engine. After some back and forth with myself i decided to swap out the Swiss cheese engine for another one, a 2.0t out of an 07. Everything seemed to go pretty good until yesterday wen i went to start it for the first time.
Added in full synthetic European car 5-40 oil, added it nice and slow and checked for leaks, I wasn't able to see any. added in the new coolant, again slowly to let the air bubbles out of the system. Put in the brand new NGK pre-gapped spark plugs. Before i did a cold start, i took out the fuel pump fuse to try and get the oil circulated before the engine actually started. after a couple of start attempts i put the fuse back in and started the car. It take a few seconds to start (I assume to get the fuel in the line). Well when it started it sounded like a diesel engine, very rough and not good at all. I turned it off almost immediately, thought maybe the oil hadn't lubed everything up yet. I tried for a second start with the same results.

I am assuming by the sound, some how it is not timed correctly. When I put in the new water pump, timing belt, and tensioner, i thought i lined up the TDC marks both on the top and the bottom correctly. Is there something else it could be before i take the front apart again to try and get it to run correctly?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

Scan it for codes if your can. If you get a usb cable you can use VCDS lite or just get a cheap bluetooth OBDII dongle on amazon.

 

Hey Kaevin,

Well as it turns out I am simple but big mistake. I was dumbfounded and couldn't find any info on why it was acting like it was. I have an OBD reader on my laptop that gives all codes plus monitoring info and it was a clear read. I checked the oil pressure and it was spot on. I ended up taking the head off to make sure somehow the gasket didn't get shifted or creased, and sure enough, this master mechanic put it on wrong and the gasket was blocking the oil from getting into parts of the heads. So that has been corrected and since it was off i checked the cam tensioner chain, and i am glad i did that, that was pretty much gone.

Long story short, all replacement parts have come in and i should have it running today.,

 

That cam tensioner chain is almost always bad given these cars are 12+ years old. Like most of the these cars in the junkyards, that goes...so does the timing belt. I did the Timing belt on mine and the tensioner chain and tensioner too. Figure do it all while the engine is apart then you wont have to worry again for years.