broken crank

[moTthediesel]

I think I broke my damn crank! Anybody else ever hear of this in this happening on a 1.6 TD?

[burn_your_money]

Pictures or it never happened!

What makes you think you broke it?

[jtanguay]

you'll have to call Guinness world records 

[Baron VonZeppelin]

Running over it with a bulldozer does not count !
Hollow grinding the journals is an exclusion too ......

[maxfax]

Running over it with a bulldozer does not count !

That won;t break them either..   Well unless it's bigger than an early 40's Cat D8, then maybe.....

[fukengruven1982]

not buyin it....lets see pics

[Zulfiqar]

VWs oldschool crank supplier used depleted uranium    pics or you aint broke it - If you have Guiness world records call it is.

[Rabbit on Roids]

i gotta see this...

[moTthediesel]

Well, it's either broken or all the flywheel bolts have sheared off, because the starter cranks the flywheel, but the timing end of the crank doesn't turn.

This is an all-star grenade job, as the pistons and valves have had a cornfield meet too -- without the timing belt breaking.  So either the engine (which was running great) suddenly jumped several teeth on a brand new T belt at all of about 1500 rpm, causing the valve crash and resulting in the sheering of said bolts. Or, the crank broke, causing the valves to go out of time, and resulting in them saying hello to the pistons.

I won't know until I perform a full postmortem, and that won't happen for some time, as I'm walking away from it for awhile for the sake of my (too late?) sanity.

[theman53]

Or the cam gear slipped.

[Rabbit TD]

Or the cam gear slipped.

Yes that set up scares me too everytime I loosen that bolt and pop the gear loose.  I'm really carefull and probably excessive too tightening that bolt, I also use blue locctite on it

[moTthediesel]

Or the cam gear slipped.

Only way I can see that is if the cam bearings seized, but I guess that's possible --

[Patrick]

I saw a siezes cam once a bunch of years ago on a gasser. My brother put the engine together with the wrong head gasket, no oil to a couple of journals.

[rabbitman]

Or the cam gear slipped.

X2, some people torque the cam bolt to 45ft-lbs just to make sure.

My guess is the gear slipped and when the valves and pistons hit and stopped the crank then the flywheels inertia made it keep spinning and break the bolts. Someone else on here had the bolts break too.

[Syncroincity]

Don't say it never happens...

Karl M.'s TDI failure at 3500 rpm: (photos lifted from YahooGroups TDI conversion site)