Oil pump chain FAILURE
Steve Rothwell discovers a serious engine problem with his Skoda Fabia 1.4 TDI when investigating a failure to start.
The worst time that a breakdown can occur, would probably be on a Sunday night when its raining. It was late one Sunday evening when I received a call from my granddaughter informing me that my Skoda had broken down. The sting in the tail here is that her insurance does include breakdown cover, but on this Sunday night their system was down, and they couldn’t offer any assistance. So out I went.
The engine management light had flickered on the night before and I had told her to pop along and let me check it out, though the next morning the light was out again, and with the rain teaming down I decided to put her off until it was a little drier.
Arriving at the Fabia, I attempted to start the engine only to find it locked. I was pretty sure that this couldn’t be the timing belt, as I had inspected that only a couple of weeks previously, and with the wettest weather we had seen for a while, I decided to just tow the Skoda to the workshop and deal with things later.
The next morning, I removed the timing cover to confirm that the belt was good, and then I removed the glow plugs to ensure that the engine had not taken in any water causing hydraulic lock. With this confirmed, the next stage was to remove the injector rocker shaft to confirm that this was not the cause.
After these checks I suspected that the cause of the engine lock-up was the oil pump and balance shaft chain which may have broken – and so the only way to confirm this was to remove the sump.
Putting the Skoda up in the air and draining the oil, I then removed the sump to discover that the short chain driving the oil pump and the balance shaft had indeed broken. It was removed quite easily and at first the only damage appeared to be to the tensioner, though a closer inspection revealed that the sprocket on the crankshaft had damage to the teeth. The next blow came when I phoned the dealer to discover that this small cog is only supplied with a new crankshaft.
Having just spent out on a complete set of four new tyres less than a week earlier, there was no way the Sko
