Considering a 2000 or 2001 A4 avant

[Arthur Marks]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Eric_R_Kissell at whirlpool.com
To: Taka Mizutani
Cc: Arthur Marks ; quattro at audifans.com
Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2005 1:00 PM
Subject: Re: Considering a 2000 or 2001 A4 avant

Is this sludge issue mostly a question of dino oil versus a good synthetic
oil?

Has anyone heard of a sludge issue in a car using a good synthetic oil?

I would think with a good synthetic you could go longer than 10k miles,
though I would want to use oil analysis to verify that the oil was not
dirty or degraded before blindly running long change intervals.

YMMV,
Eric


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Using synthetic is probably the most important preventative measure to avoid
sludge in this turbo. Still they also doubled the size of the oil filter.
Maybe that was something that they could control so that even if someone
still skimps by using dino oil and goes more than a couple 1000 miles on it
the larger filter would help prevent a glut of sludged up A4s. If I were you
I wouldn't go more than 7500 miles with synthetic in this car.

One other possible contributing factor is the use of RTV sealant instead of
a gasket for the oil pan. The immediate problem with my car was that the oil
suction screen was clogged causing low oil pressure (pressure is fine now).
Aside from being clogged with sludge it was clogged with pieces of sealant.
Now, my car had its pump replaced when it was just over a year old, so
that's the fault of the dealer. One would think that the factory would have
a precise method of applying the sealant, but who is to say that there 
aren't
problems at times?

My clogged filter (yellowish stuff is the white, oil-stained sealant):
http://images5.theimagehosting.com/CloggedOilSuctionScreen.JPG

Another thing you can do to check for sluge problems is to drain the old oil
through a paint filter to see if you've got a lot of large particles.

--Art

and here is the Audi oil sludge letter:
http://forums.audiworld.com/a4/msgs/2137644.phtml