Some already know that my car suffered the dreaded 118TSI death. After 3 months with the car I was loving it. It had 65000km's on the clock and is a late 2011 built model (MY12). When I bought the car I was confident that being a later model I would have no issues with misfiring or cracked pistons. I was wrong!!!
Driving home from work one day and it started off with a rough idle at the lights. Then cruising down the highway and I felt it misfire and saw a puff of black smoke in my mirror. At first I didn't think much of it, but by the time I got home I could hear that nobody was home in 1 cylinder. I had it compression tested, and the fears were confirmed. No compression in cylinder 4.
Cylinder 4 had cracked the piston between the 2 lower rings and the ring had scratched the piston just enough that a nail caught. Couple pictures of the pistons after they were taken out.
Bore Scratch
Piston as it came out
After doing a lot of research I decided to steer away from the VW pistons. The advice from my mechanic at Eurotune Miami was that the area of the piston below the oil ring was way to thin. Even the VW replacement pistons showed exactly the same problem. With help from Blower and a few other forum members I went with Wossner pistons.
A couple of weeks and they had arrived from Germany.
Wossner Piston
Old vs New
The block will be in this week to be bored and 0.5mm larger to accomodate the new pistons. I am already running the Harding Performance stage 1 tune and was very happy with it before everything went bad. I have picked up a used S3 intercooler which will be fitted up to the car when the engine goes back in, which will allow me to go stage 2 once I am happy that everything has settled (downpipe required)
Feel free to follow my thread as my beloved car gets forged pistons and a few other upgrades to hopefully turn this engine into something extremely reliable.
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