Last night we finally finished removing the cylinder head from the TDI
Beetle. We were pretty eager to inspect the damage to the engine
after the timing belt break, and I was expecting a real mess. I was
thinking we'd have to replace pistons and possibly even replace the
head and bore out the block.
What we ended up finding was a startlingly small amount of damage, almost
entirely localized to the cylinder head. In this first picture, you can
see the whole engine bay with the head removed. If you've ever looked under
the hood of a TDI Beetle, you can appreciate the amount of stuff we had
to remove just to get access. (click image for larger view)
In this next picture, you can see the underside of the cylinder head.
You really can't see any damage in the picture, but the exhaust valve
for the #1 cylinder (it's the valve all the way on the left in this
picture) is bent a tiny bit - just enough so that it doesn't seat
perfectly flat anymore. (click image for larger view)
In this next picture, you see a closer view of the block. The debris
in the cylinder bores is junk that fell in while we were removing the
head and head gasket. If you look close, you can see that the #1 piston
(all the way on the left in this picture) has one shiny ring showing,
which is where that exhaust valve hit against it. That's the only
damage underneath the cylinder head that we could find. No broken or
melted pistons, no cylinder bore scoring... sweet.
(click image for larger view)
And here is a closeup of the "damaged" piston, which I see no reason
to worry about. We're tentatively planning on just doing a cylinder
head rebuild (with all new valves, even though only one is visibly
damaged). (click image for larger view)
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