Tappet noise and treatments?

[Shoppinit]

Great info.

Is it a needle bearing in the rocker? Could you press it out and press a new one in?

[north-star]

I’ve been looking into this for a while. Our engines use a larger rocker arm which then has a roller bearing integrated into it.

It also has 2 smaller lifters which you can remove. Not that many other Audis have this sort of configuration.

The lifter themselves aren’t that bad to remove, but you need to remove the whole cambelt and camshafts. That in itself is just a lot of work and costly. New bolts for the cam carriers are about £50. The lifters are about £25 each and ofcourse we have 40’of them.

The carriers are much more difficult to remove. They are fixed in place by a long rod (1 for exhaust and 1 for inlet) that goes all the way down the head. The only way to remove these is to either take the heads off or to remove the cats front end. For rhe passenger side they slide out backwards toward the firewall so only option is to take the head off or remove the engine.

The large rockers only seem available from Audi. They are about £200 each and come with the lifters. We’d need 20 of them.

I’ve bought 20 new lifters and a spare rocker just to see how they work. I’ve also got an ultrasonic cleaner so was planning on doing my cambelt then swapping all the exhaust lifters for new, plus cleaning all the inlet ones.

I bought a second hand rocker arm with lifters and was surprised at how well they cleaned up. When I find Tim I will post photos.

Yes, it was discussed that if i was doing a repair on this to then take the engine out and have a look, clean up and repair both banks as it would seem a waste of time and effort to do the side affected, put everything back together then get the same issue on the opposite side in a few months etc!

As it stands with that it's just a bit much for me to justify the money it would cost for Labour alone, it's more of a project for someone who has the facilities and time to do this himself to save thousands in labour.

Looks like it's going to be sold on as a running project sadly

[Nobby]

Great info.

Is it a needle bearing in the rocker? Could you press it out and press a new one in?

You could press it out and find a suitable replacement but it’s getting it out that’s the problem.

There are a few videos of people rebuilding engines on YouTube that maybe cover 20 seconds of fitting them. That’s how I found out how to remove them.

When you remove the cams you flip the rockers upside down and the lifters can be pulled out. I’m going to clean all of mine and refit the best 24 that I find, then 16 new ones.

Buying 40 new ones would have been £600

[Nobby]

I’ll do a step by step guide when I do it, but got a long list of things to do now and struggling to find a suitable time to start it.

[Shoppinit]

Nice. Look forward to it.

[Shoppinit]

Makes me appreciate the solid lifters in my M3.