The Day My Water Pump Seized

The thing about owning performance cars is.... if you thrash the pants off it and it fails - fair enough. However, if all you want to do is drive to work at a leisurely 30 MPH in traffic and then your car give way in spectacular style.... well then that's unfair!

Here's what's happened. My missus works in the UK Television programme called Coronation Street. One Thursday as she's leaving I say,

"You take a Golf today and I'll give the S4 a good run to work,"

Because I drive a lot of miles, around 96 per day, the Audi S4 costs me around £16 GBP per day in petrol. Hop into my Golf 5 GT-TDI and it drops down to £7.00 per day in diesel..... With these type of costs, my missus uses the Audi for shopping, re-aligning the tracking with kerbs while parking and usually comes home with custom dents and scratches from shopping trolleys. So there comes a time when the Audi needs to be taken out and give some chance to do things it was designed to do.

OK, so I'm about 12 minutes into my journey heading to Manchester Airport to join the M56 to get me to work. I'm in a steady, slow moving stream of traffic when my dashboard "chimes" at me with a nice, red "your engine is cooking" symbol. Looking at the temperature gauge buried over to the right hand side confirms the warning.

I pull over into a yard of a local business and then switch off a very hot car. After about 10 minutes, I then attempt to re-start the car. The starter motor can hardly turnover the engine, I can hear unpleasant noises and the engine just won't start.

I feel sick. I phone up my brother-in-law and he arrives with a transporter. Trying to kid myself that those noises I heard didn't really exist, I dropped my Audi to the nearest Audi dealer.

Afterwards, they said they had tried to start it and could hear "clearance issues" under the bonnet. I asked them to investigate and they confirmed that the water pump had seized and..... THE CAM BELT HAD JUMPED SOME TEETH!!!!!! I feel more sick.

Now, Audi dealers in the UK charge some £80 per hour [for example, £1,000 labour to strip the heads]. Now I think this is a lot of money.

So, I get a friend who runs his own Audi business to pick up my car and strip it down for me.

To get to the front of 2.7 litre Bi-Turbo lump you have to strip the whole of the front of the car down (click on the pictures for hi-res):

It appears that the water pump had seized, causing the cam belt to judder which then destroyed the bearings in the idler tensioner pulley. Therefore, the cam belt was flopping around untensioned. Because the driven side of the belt is kept taught by the load of the cam gear, this explains why the engine was running perfectly until it was switched off. When the engine was stationary, the cam belt slackened off; the starter motor was enough to cause the belt to jump teeth causing serious issues within the combustion chambers.

Removing the left Vee band head confirmed a lot of damage:

All valves have collided with the pistons and one of number 1 cylinder's inlet valves had snapped off! You'll also notice that its counterparts on the other two cylinders are also bent....

And where did the other bit of the valve end up? Here:

A neat hole straight through the piston.

The good news? Well, as it's No 1 cylinder, the sump splits in two and we can remove it.... also, there in the sump was the bit of piston aluminium that was punched out by the valve! For future reference, if you end up in this situation, the pistons are weight-matched at the factory, if you clean the piston you'll see a weight stamped onto it. Unfortunately this means a longish wait for a new one to be shipped from Germany.....

Here's the block for this side of the vee:

Unfortunately (lots of them in this article...), looking at the other bank:

These pistons have had some contact with the valves but by no where as much as the other bank. Inspection of the cylinder head confirms this:

Appeal

So what's my next move? Well, a lot of labour dismantling the heads and a lot of money buying valves. By the look of things, the head looks like a 1.8 Turbo with one cylinder missing - hopefully the valves won't be too expensive.

What can you do for me? Well, if you've got a spare engine please get in touch!

Also, you could buy some stuff in my shop!!!!

OBD-II Hardware

Thanks for reading! Andy.