Hello,
New member to the forum but avid reader of it, some excellent stuff in here!
Unfortunately had the car fail on me while driving... Could be 100 things till I get it investigated, and I'm not much of a mechanic but wondered if its jumped timing going by previous posts, and being notorious, but after a long search I couldn't find much detailed info of similar experiences to what happened.
59/10 plate GTI, manual, 70k miles & serviced it only 6 days (drove 150~miles) before it happened..
The car hasn't felt itself the last month or so, and almost felt like there was a flat spot whilst accelerating in the higher gears, along with being a little sluggish. I put it down to requiring a service & maybe the valves are coked up.
(I should have got this looked at sooner... idiot
)
Anyway.. So I started it up after finishing work & sounded fine, car has always had a loud valve tick but never really had
that initial rattle to suggest the tensioner was failing.
I drove about 5 miles, and just as I started accelerating towards 60mph after passing through a village, this almighty screech came from the engine and had massive loss of power.
Sounded like a total bag of spanners. No lights came up on the dash & theres still none.
Dipped the clutch and the noise went away altogether, sounding normal. I coasted it as far as I could get it, but with nowhere to stop on a single-track back road, I had to put it back in gear and drove another mile or so. The noise had gone for this mile whilst driving, but just had very little power.
Arrived at a junction and as I came to a standstill with the clutch dipped, the engine cut out.
I tried to start the car over again but nothing happened. Didn't turn over at all.
Once I got the car rescued and taken home (& thinking I had nothing to lose!), I tried starting it again and it did. Just sounds
really rough on idle. Turned the car off sharpish and haven't tried since.
I'm wondering if anyone had any similar experiences or an idea of what could of happened? In hindsight I wondered if the screech was the turbo failing but I've had this nagging feeling its the timing that's jumped.
My plan of attack is to firstly check the timing and see if its in time & if it's still the original tensioner. The guy I bought the car from claimed it had been done but there was nothing he could show me to prove this. Then depending on findings, maybe try a compression test? I'm keen to investigate this myself.
Very much open to any help or suggestions you can help me with!! Absolutely gutted to say the least
. Just got the front wings replaced & the front bumper re-sprayed, she's looking in her prime!