Balance shaft

D

deejaydee1978

Member
Just been told by the garage that my balance shaft has siezed on my A2.

The car's still under warranty but I'm not sure if they'll pay out.

Has anyone else had a similar fault?
 
As the balance shaft is not considered a service item, or subject to normal wear and tear, there is no reason why the fix should not be done free of charge.

Cheers,

Mike
 
Hi deejaydee
The engine balancer shaft is chain driven from the crankshaft and the chain also drives the oil pump. I'd ask the garage for a more detailed explaination as I'm fairly sure the balancer can't have siezed. If it had, the chain would snap and the oil pump would stop working, wrecking the bottom end of the engine.
Sorry to be so alarmist but their diagnosis does not make sense.

Cheers Spike
 
He did say that it was very unusual, the chain never snapped but instead ripped all the teeth off the bottom half of the sprockett. This meant the chain was running free and the self tensioner had tried to take up the slack.

The Chain eventually rubbed through the engine cover and this caused a huge oil leak.


I'm still baffled as to how this would have happened, i thought the chain would have snapped before anything else gave way???
 
Me too, until i saw it myself!!!

The guys at Audi weren't too clued up on it either, took them ages to find the part number.

Obviously (just my luck) it's a really rare fault. :mad:
 
No. 25 in this picture (AMF,ANY,BHC,ATL,ANY)

:eek: Ouch! Sounds nasty.

Did you get an oil pressure warning at all? If not you may have been lucky - I think the oil pump can still go even with a stalled balancer shaft if the teeth were stripped off the balancer shaft sprocket and not the crankshaft sprocket (I assume that this is what you mean when you refer to "the bottom half" of the sprocket - it would be the teeth on the top half of the crankshaft sprocket that would have gone). I guess that the chain rode over the teeth rather than sheared them off. It would then just batter them away.

Hope you get satisfaction.

(Later edit) Just realised stupidity of remark about top half of crankshaft sprocket - of course this was still rotating so they ALL would have gone!
 
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