[Vwdiesel] 2001 Jetta TDI: Timing belts and Turbo

[Doug Ferguson]

Welcome Donald, James gave you a brilliant answer and kudos to him for that.  HOw's your intake manifold? They get plugged up with carbon. If that's clear, then I wanted to add that in my experience with this problem, the turbo boost controller system isn't doing it's job. Since the system works fine most of the time, I doubt there's a problem with the vacuum valves or lines or boost actuator, which leaves the variable vanes inside the turbo, which are what the actuator moves to do fine control of the boost. Over time these get carbon build up and start to get sticky. This makes the boost go out of spec, which is what James referred to. The computer doesn't like it. I've actually found that driving at high speed can help burn out the carbon and free those vanes up. The cops aren't big on that though. 100 + mph for a little while can make a difference. I would imagine that over in the father land where there's an autobahn, they have less problem with carboned up vanes.  Risky though, 
 and your car and tires need to be in great shape.  So, the other option is removing the turbo, disassembling it and cleaning out the carbon. Another thing that can help is to change the EGR duty cycle to where you don't have as much of that going through and gumming up the works. Enough for you to think about for now, these are great cars though in their way and worth fixing unless you have to have a mech do it all.  Best of luck.



Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2018 02:40:41 +0000
From: Donald Edgar <edgar.donald at gmail.com mailto:edgar.donald at gmail.com >
To: "vwdiesel at vwfans.com mailto:vwdiesel at vwfans.com " <vwdiesel at vwfans.com mailto:vwdiesel at vwfans.com >
Subject: [Vwdiesel] 2001 Jetta TDI: Timing belts and Turbo
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Hi there,

This forum was recommended to me by a co-worker. I have a 2001 Jetta TDI
that I bought from some friends a year and change ago. Since then I've
driven it quite a bit, including a third of the way across the states.

Currently, it is due for a new timing belt, which the mechanic quoted at
around $800. Additionally, when driving it through the mountain passes of
the Rockies, the car would lose most of its acceleration and I could only
do about 35-45 uphill with the pedal to the floor (the cars behind me on
the single lane were not happy about that). The check engine light came on,
and googling it came up with an issue with the turbo. This only happened
around 8000' - 9000' elevation while trying to go at highway speeds. Once
the car made it down to about 5000' feet, the engine light went out and
hasn't come on since.

I love the car, and would love to keep it (passenger diesels and manual
transmissions are seemingly hard to come by). Sadly, I know next to nothing
about cars, but am willing to learn... in your opinion, is this something I
could learn to do myself or is it something I really should take it to a
mechanic to do? Additionally, is it even worth it to have a mechanic work
on it at this point? Compounding my problems, I don't have a garage (street
parking) and I don't own any real tools, so I imagine there would be a
significant upfront investment, in addition to the parts.

Thanks for any advice you can offer!