Engine service horrors!!

[steve briance]

Dropped in to my nearest help yourself scrapyard today for a browse. Managed to pick up a spare ISV but to be honest, there is not much else of use these days as the cars are all rather new in there. 56 plate cars appear in scrapyards these days

Anyway, while browsing I saw two hilarious examples of how lack of care in maintaining your engine can lead to trouble...

Ever seen carbon deposits like these before? And what about oil deposits so old it had gone hard?!

[Tractor Dave]

That will be long life service regime for sure!

[tango123]

haha. long life servicing + using wrong oil.

[Bowie69]

Plus, direct injection petrol engines furr up the intakes like that pretty well.

To be honest, the head of my 215,000 mile 7A is spotless inside.

[steve briance]

The inside of my 7a is spotless as well, I can't imagine how long it takes to build up gunge like that and as for those carbon deposits, that is just incredible. All the ports were like that, it must equal a significant disruption to airflow, I mean just the one in the picture is 25%closed up?!? Cars like this make the marketing really easy for those mobile carbon cleaning chaps. A sure fire satisfied customer after cleaning that lot up!

[Bowie69]

Yeah, without the petrol injected into the port, that build up can happen very quickly, silly design IMHO, but there we are

[K Simmonds]

haha. long life servicing + using wrong oil.

,, This is now becoming a common problem, 'long life service' intervals are a false economy unless the vehicle does a large amount of motorway miles and even then it's not how I'd treat my car, modern turbocharged engines require Ester based fully synthetic oil.

Also the emissions systems installed these days cause more harm than good.

[Lago Blue]

It's not always simply lack of care or service. My 7A is also very clean inside, but not due to anything I've done. Build-up like that can be a design issue too. For example despite much shared architecture with the inline 8 and 10V motors, every Audi 2.8 V6 will look like that 1st photo above inside both it's cam-cover's generous but riveted-closed vent compartments; and much like that 2nd photo, inside it's otherwise lovely dual path alloy intake manifold. The only exceptions will be those who have both, had incorporated Mance's clever stand-pipe mod to the cam-covers: and received hours of cleaning and soaking to get back to bare metal everywhere. Such a simple mod, stopped my AAH's oil consumption, oil from degrading the intake tube's elbow seal to the throttle body, and the gunk build-up on the throttles through to the intake-valves, even stopped the frequent "coking" closed of the EGR passage. And yes with all those yards of otherwise tuned passage-ways upstream of the injectors choked down wasn't exactly helpful in that regard either. It does remind me that part of the appeal of these cars is despite their imperfections and limitations, being able to make them work a little better than new is always quite satisfying.

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