[Vwdiesel] Initial Diagnosis: 1998 VW TDI Jetta

[Val Christian]

My third VW diesel was a "Heathkit Diesel" where I bought the car with most
of the engine in a cardboard box, from a friend of a neighbor, who had
started a car project in the neighbor's garage.  It was a 79 Rabbit
Diesel, and I already had two 79's in my collection.  So why not?

The bearings "looked" horrible.  A mentor, who did allot of road rally and
racing work, and did engine work for other rallists and racers, looked 
at my mains after I plastigaged them, and found them to be well within wear
limits.  I thought the journal bearings looked "bad".  He thought otherwise.
He said what I was looking at was some lead, and that the underlying copper 
layer was not exposed.  The crank looked better to me, however he said
one judges by the bearing material because that is the deformable material.

Since I was doing surface metrology software development for a lab, I talked
with the engineers there, who loaded me with text books, and essentially
confirmed my mentor's findings.

At the time, the VW had about 135,000 miles.  I put it back together, and
ran it until almost 400k miles, without ever having a lower end problem.
When I pulled the oil pan, because the oil pan had developed a leak at a 
rock strike point, I pulled the #3 main, and looked at it.  It was as I
had remembered it years before, except that the lead wear pattern had grown
just a little bit more (about 3 mm), probably corresponding to some
very very small wear.  

The car died a non-violent death, so I did some parts stripping, and did
retrieve four of the mains, the journals of which sit in one of my tool 
boxes.





> 
> Well I do need to replace the connecting rod bearings, there is uneven wear,
> worn in dirt, and 'polishing' in certain spots.
> 
> On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 6:01 PM, <LBaird119 at aol.com> wrote:
> 
> > In a message dated 1/9/2011 11:53:09 AM Pacific Standard Time,
> > eriklane at gmail.com writes:
> >
> > > I always feel a little bad even putting new bearings in - like I'm
> > > wasting a perfectly good set that was already in there. (Of course I do
> > it
> > > anyway, because it's a silly place to save a couple bucks and risk the
> > > engine. It's just the thought of how good of shape the old ones were in.)
> > >
> > >
> >   When I first tore into one of these diesels I found the same.
> > Plastigauge
> > showed that they indeed didn't need replaced.  So I didn't.  Hard to be
> > sure that new bearings would indeed be <.001" and not that one would
> > really want them to.  Plus they were already properly worn in.
> >    Loren
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> >
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