A Great URQ Week-end

[Jenny Allan]

Hello Q-list:

Well we started our big project of diving into the URQ toasted engine.  
After much deliberation, we decided to yank out the engine and open up 
the head to assess the damage before deciding how to proceed further. 

As those of you who've done it will probably attest, this is easier said 
than done.  The Bentley manual for removing the engine is twenty pages 
of terse and unhelpful prose like "remove altenator"  "remove clutch 
slave cylinder"  Also there was a bunch of stuff that needed to come off 
(such as the air dam and an assembly at the front of the engine now 
affectionately dubbed, "THE HULK") to get the engine lowered out of the 
car that the Bentley just didn't mention.  Perhaps if we had a more 
professional set-up than jack stands and more experience we could have 
gotten it out without removing those things....It also required ancient 
egyptian engineering with a board and a broom handle cut up to make 
crude wheels for a skate board low enough to get the engine out from 
under the car.

We were also slowed down by none of the three of us ever having done 
this much work on an Audi before as well as needing to carefully label 
and store parts after they were removed.  After three days of struggling 
to remove most of front end of the car, the engine finally was free of 
the car at 8 p.m. last night. 

The reigning theory going in was that detonation had caused a piston to 
melt, and that it was probably not going to be rebuildable, because the 
cylinder would be damaged and would have to be bored out and you can't 
get bigger pistons for this engine.

This turned out to be entirely wrong.  We got the head off and were very 
puzzled to see nothing wrong with it.  Our only clue as to what really 
went wrong was a slight shiny spot on the botton of cylinder #2.  We 
turned the engine over and took the oil pan off and things became much 
clearer: bits of shrapnel fell out and the most horrid oil stink ever 
emminated from the bottom end.  (No jokes please). The number 2 bearing 
was entirely missing, causing a lot of extra play in #2 and hence the 
shiny spot, where there was a bit of free lance polishing going on.

Most of the bearings were pretty gouged up and the one that had shredded 
got lodged in the oil pump and enough other places to completely seize 
up the flywheel.  Which explains why the car wouldn't run at all and why 
it was so difficult to rotate the engine by pushing it back and forth 
when it was in gear.  It looks like the culprit was nothing more than 
good old fashioned oil failure: tired oil going in on a very stressful 
day at the track.  So ouch, mea culpa again!  Dang! 

Our next step is to take the thing out to be cleaned so we get a better 
idea of what needs to be done.  It looks like a new oil pump, all new 
bearings and one connecting rod (From #2) will be in order.  All in all 
not nearly as dire as was first predicted.  And I've learned a very 
painful and expensive lesson about being more attentive to oil changes, 
especially on the turbo car.

I'm very pleased with the outcome of the week-end, since after three day 
battle to get one engine out, I wasn't looking forward to doing the same 
thing with a donor car.  I'm also very grateful to the crew that we had 
working till 11:00 last night.

Jenny Allan