jlbell

Hello all,

I just recently joined the B8 family, after acquiring a 2010 A4 Quattro Avant with the CAEB engine. I bought it with a know "blown" engine, as the original mechanic stated. Turns out it was just the typical CAEB timing chain tensioner failure, with an interesting twist. After sitting for about 2 weeks my father and I managed to tow it to my cousins mechanic shop, where I got to work and found a highly concerning root cause of the engine being out of time. The cause was that whoever changed the original timing chain tensioner, whether under warranty or not, ONLY REPLACED THE TENSIONER! The mechanic or dealership did not think it was necessary to change to the upgraded chains or replace the guides. This in effect caused the new style of timing tensioner to overextend, due to a stretched timing chain, and fail over time. I am writing this from my office computer, so I will have to upload pictures later (I hope I took one of how significant the timing chain drop/stretch was). So my warning to people who own a 2.0T with the common timing chain tensioner failure, check your invoices to make sure whoever repaired it also replaced most importantly the chains and secondly the guides. I look forward to being apart of this community and helping whenever possible. I have already seen and responded to lots of posts about the 1N3 steering issues, which my car suffers from currently. For the time being, I am just overlooking it and am enjoying driving a turbocharged Audi from a naturally aspirated D3 A8.

uberwgn

J, thanks for the heads up. Seems like the key components in the chain's path should be changed out.

How many miles on this car?

jlbell

Whenever I purchased the car it had around 148,000. With the original owner reporting random difficult starting, before it wouldn't start at all.

uberwgn

Thanks.

SMac770

I assumed this was already known, early (guess we'll have to wait a few years to see if the later revisions are the same) B8 chains can be a problem after enough miles. There's a long thread on the subject of monitoring the camshaft adaptation as a heads up on chain state at audizine: https://www.audizine.com/forum/showt...ser-adaptation

I replaced the chains and tensioners and guides at 130k on my 09 several years back. My adaptation value bounces between .2 and .3 degrees for me these days, 50k miles after replacing everything.

jlbell

This makes me want to go outside and test it to see how well of a timing job I did, but at the same time not.

jlbell

Is that 1.2 and 1.3 degrees or 0.2/0.3? I checked mine recently and was at -1.21 degrees, so hopefully that isn't bad. I also called my local Audi dealership today and found out that the pistons and rings were replaced in 2014. Turns out I may have snagged a pretty good deal of $500 for the car and $500 in parts.

SMac770

0.3 for me. As noted in the thread, anything 0 to 4 is all equally good. It's once the adaptation goes over 4 that you get the concern that the system is having to overextend to compensate for slack. + or - doesn't seem to matter, just the absolute value.