2004 R32 TURBO Cranks but Will Not Start

hi my friends have a good one for you today this is the 2004 volkswagen r32 turbocharged vr6 now this is not my 2004 r32 turbocharged vr6 mine is actually just right over there in a thousand pieces and pieces over here and pieces back here but this car was towed to me because it won't start i do have a little bit of details on the car but i don't know everything so we're gonna walk through the process of diagnosing it hopefully fixing it so be sure to watch the entire video to see if we actually get there and fix it now short of pushing it in the shop putting the hood light on it and putting the battery charger on it and pulling down the lower dash and i'll tell you why in a second i've not done anything to this car i pulled down the lower dash because i was told that there's just a disaster of wiring up underneath the dash now it actually doesn't look terrible under there but as far as what's wired into what that i don't have any clue now this is a pretty modified car as we can see it's lowered it's got a turbocharger on it you see the front mount charge cooler up in the front this car is running a cts turbo kit with united motorsports software the current owner is not the one that did the turbocharger kit he bought it turbocharged fixed a bunch of problems with the car and then had it running well eventually the car got to the point where it needed a slave cylinder i don't remember exactly why so transmission out slave cylinder in transmission back up car runs really well about a week after the car got the slave cylinder replaced the current owner is backing out of the driveway cut the wheel boom car shuts off just like you would if you turn the key off this wasn't a sputter and die type thing from that point on the car would crank but not start now there's a handful of things we know there's a handful of things we don't know and a ton of stuff we don't know that we don't know and some things we can assume one way or the other so we know the car is modified we know it's not on stock ecm the current owner has swapped a handful of parts around including an ecm which didn't change that the car cranks but does not start it's probably not a crank position sensor typically when these crank position sensors fail which is common you don't get an rpm on the tach while cranking so we're not ruling the g28 out but it's probably not that we can also probably assume it's not an immobilizer issue typically immobilizer failures on volkswagens results in the car starting running for about one second and then shutting right back off in our case the car's never starting not gonna completely rule it out but it's probably not either one of those two things we can in a way assume that the starter is good because it does in fact crank so that means the relay's probably good and the starter is probably good now it may not be but we can assume at least parts of that system are good so we're not going to push starter all the way up to the beginning point of our diagnostic list while we might have a bad starter not spinning fast enough it's not high on my priority list and allegedly there are no fault codes stored in the ecm but we'll hook up scan tool and confirm that one of my favorite early steps when you have an unknown car with really honestly unknown mods doing something wrong is to start with a visual inspection we know the car had work recently but not right before it failed but that doesn't mean that there isn't a problem related to the work that was done and transmission out can be a pretty major repair especially when you see how shoehorned this turbocharger setup is in we're going to start our visual inspection under the hood and see what we got going on so we'll notice right away that our injectors have different connectors on them these are upgraded injectors look at how shoehorned this turbocharger setup is inside of this car so we want to take a really good look at what's going on here and in a second we'll crank it and actually see what it sounds like but i'm just looking for anything just blatantly obvious like the air intake not being attached or something like that it looks like all this stuff is on here pretty well nothing glaring nothing obvious nothing unplugged now a common thing on modified volkswagen especially like the mark four one eight turbos is o2 sensor wiring getting smashed having some concern about maybe o2 sensor wiring if you look way down there oh boy okay so i don't know that we found the problem yet but if we look way down there we can see that the firewall and the downpipe are pretty close and it almost looks like there's some wires maybe touching or a little smash so those are o2 sensor wires which are not fused that's something we're going to take a better look at when we get the car up in the air i want to show you guys that wiring well i hope you heard that the fuel pump does prime and wow wow wow that is loud i'm guessing based on the modifications it's probably an upgraded fuel pump so here's our wiring spaghetti that the owner was talking about this should be for like boost gauge stuff and all kinds of things it does have this p3 gauge and a couple of other gauges here as well our fuse panel looks like there's fuses in every slot but we'll check those and make sure that they're actually good let's go ahead and open the shop door up crank it and see what it sounds like all right here we go [Music] all right so it does in fact crank something else that i always pay attention to whenever i'm cranking a car that won't start if it has a tack i like to watch to see if the tac actually shows an rpm so we do have rpm it does crank now it sounded weird cranking not so much like it had no compression but maybe even like a weak compression uh i don't know how long this car has been cranked or anything like that so that may be related but that definitely didn't sound ideal i think i'm actually going to also crank it again while standing under the hood so i'm going to need someone else to crank it for me or get one of those starter buttons we'll put that on the back burner until i can get an extra set of hands to crank the car in the meantime let's do some really easy basic stuff check our fuses and things like that to be sure we don't just have a blown fuse or something dumb like that causing our no start condition while we're here i'm actually going to just do a quick test on the battery now i flipped up the fuse panel for the fuse on top of the battery we can see this alternator fuse is very very very unhappy this probably won't cause it to not start but it's for sure an issue so if you're taking notes you want to write something like that down all right so this is telling us that we do have a good battery so that's good while we're here since this little machine can do this let's go ahead and do a starter test too crank engine until starts well that might be a problem friend cranking test volt drop normal this says it's actually okay so we're going to go with that and move on to checking all of our fuses all right let's buzz these fuses we're going to use a trusty power probe now i'm not going to be able to test all of them some of them are closed off but we'll handle that when we get to it for right now let's just turn our key on get our battery charger hooked back up and test some fuses oh so i actually pulled this fuse out and while this fuse looks good it looks like there's some crusty stuff inside of here so i'm going to actually pull this fuse panel out and see if we can get a better look at how much crust is inside of there in the meantime though i am going to pull all these fuses out and just take a look at them now one just pulling a fuse and looking at it doesn't always tell you whether the fuse is actually good two if you are going to do this this is so important take out one at a time don't take them all out and check them and then put them all back in thinking you're going to remember where they went just do one at a time trust me i've seen people mess that up so many times we'll just simply pull them out do a quick inspection and make sure it's not blown but after finding some nasty yuck inside of there we gotta deal with that anyway there's another one this right here full of yuck so when i pulled this fuse the fans kicked on high speed let's go ahead and set that one to the side he's got a couple extra ones in here i'm going to grab one of these put that fuse in the reason i did that is the fuse looked a little unhappy this is another one that doesn't really look all that happy so all these appear anyway on the surface to be good i'm not sure that this is really causing our issue so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to pull under these bolts i'm going to pull this whole panel away and try and take the backing plate off of the fuse panel just to see how bad it is it may not be anything to worry about but i want to know before we really move on to the next step so here's the good thing this fuse panel is not full of rust or crust or anything super nasty we'll have to address that fuse thing in a little bit we can also take our power probe here now from the back side and probe and see if we got power on both sides of each of these terminals that should have power okay so nothing like crazy glaring at least from just a basic fuse standpoint contamination up here in this corner will have to be addressed at some point but we're not going to worry about that too terribly much right now let's actually get the car up in the air and take a look at the bottom side and see if there's anything that stands out i also want to try and get a better look at those oxygen sensor wires that were smashed between the downpipe and the firewall okay you ever wonder why shops charge extra for lowered cars that's why normally it's not a big deal when you can drive them up on the blocks but boy that not ideal let's get up underneath this thing and take a look and see what's going on so we're noticing that we're missing the belly pan not really a huge deal because we know that there was recently work done to this i want to kind of focus on the transmission area that would have been removed in order to replace that slave cylinder so we kind of want to focus there also i'm going to try and get a better look at where that o2 sensor wire looked to be smashed between the downpipe and the firewall we'll probably end up pulling this cover off here and taking a much deeper look looking very closely at these oxygen sensors and wiring here's some more wiring that's exposed fuel pump back here still haven't ruled out fuel being part of the issue now what i want to see is actually buried way up in there so what i'm going to do is i'm going to get my borescope and see if i can get a better look now i can kind of see okay just with my eyeballs but no way i'm going to be able to show you guys what's going on up there all right so we did our quick visual inspection we checked our fuses we found that mess of wiring underneath the dash car's up in the air i pulled the sheathing back on those o2 sensor wires that look like they were jammed between the firewall and between the downpipe it doesn't really look like anything's major however we are still not eliminating that as a possibility for our no start conditions see what i've seen happen is those o2 sensor wires actually get pinched and grounded this sends a dead signal back to the ecm and actually cooks the ecm this is a really common thing on lower cars especially when you hit something and it snatches all those o2 sensor wires out of this junction i think now is a good time to go ahead and run that full scan and see if we have any red flags there while the vcds is running we have some extra time the older cars take forever to run a full scan i thought i'd come in here and poke around with our dash and some of this aftermarket stuff that we have installed on our car check out what i found so ignition is off when we push the hazard button it clicks we only have one turn signal indicator actually flashing and look at look at the oil pressure gauge it's clicking kind of in unison with our hazard relay as well as these gauges up here are also turning on and off so clearly something is unhappy underneath the dash of this car i talked to the owner of the vehicle the current owner and he said that it this has actually been happening since he's owned the car and that it's not necessarily related to the no start concern now i'm not ruling out that this is not related however if it was doing it before the car wouldn't start this is not going to be my main focus it is just kind of cool though to watch it flash like that see a step like this is important when you have a little bit of down time waiting for a scan tool or something do something poke around press buttons and you might just actually accidentally anyway stumble upon something that may not be the problem but you can either confirm it's something that we need to address or rule it out as an issue also poking around here under the hood i found that this clamp right here is loose so i don't think this is going to cause our nose start either however it's going to make taking this pipe off super easy so we may just pop this off and take a look see if there's anything maybe something got sucked down in the turbocharger and that's the reason for our no start okay so we have our vcds up and boy we got a couple of faults here to look at when we start in our engine we see that we have two faults stored for the cam position sensor and cam position sensor bank 2 g40 and g163 now initially i was like hey eureka we have a timing issue however uh this may actually not be the case before this car got towed to me i actually had some tele-diagnosis time with the owner of the car one thing i had him do is flip-flop the two connectors see a lot of times these two plugs get plugged in backwards the wires for the sensors reach about the same distance and they both plug in so it's a pretty easy thing to get wrong this is however before i knew that the car had ran post another repair actually let's go ahead and check and make sure that these are either right or wrong so when we compare the wiring diagram the connector with the lilac and brown wire in pin location number two is actually g40 so that's going to be our front one these are still flipped i'm going to go ahead and flip them back so at least we have that correct the other couple of issues we look at we have a battery voltage too low not a big deal of course it was low from all the cranking another one that i'm a little concerned about i don't think it's causing our no start problem but i am a bit concerned about is going to be our engine control unit not currently testable intermittent i haven't really done any research on this fault but i also don't recall ever seeing this now when i was poking around with the turn signals and the hazards and all the gauges flashing and everything noticing that the cluster wasn't behaving properly either i dug into the wiring diagram a tiny bit and found that all that stuff shares the same ground so i think we have a ground issue with this control unit not ready and all the stuff flicking and flashing and whatnot but because the car ran while this stuff was also going on i'm not gonna jump right to fixing that yet okay so we have our two cam position sensor fault now when i was looking in the wiring diagram to make sure that they were plugged in correctly i noted that they share two separate connections they share ground and they probably what share what is a power and then the signal back is the difference of the two sensors so we could very easily have an electrical issue in the ecm or somewhere in the wiring where one of those two wires is let's say broken or shorted and it's causing a problem with both of those not knowing where the cams are might cause a no start however i've actually seen those faults be stored and the cars still start so i think we're going to start down the path of those cam position sensors and make sure that we don't have an issue there now the next thing i'm going to do just because it's the easiest thing in the world is i'm just going to make sure that our engine is actually turning there's something interesting that i noticed when i first looked at the car so an early step and always and every car i look at is to take the oil fill cap off and just look down in the engine and i noticed that the cam variator on the intake cam was in a certain spot so what i'm going to be looking for is i'm going to be looking for that to move that's not good at all remember back to earlier in the video when i said it does crank now it sounded weird trust your gut my friends because that's exactly what's wrong if you'll notice the cams aren't turning however when we slide over we can see that we know the crank is turning all the accessory stuff is turning as well you can see the alternator turning here so we have some kind of timing issue so i should have trusted my gut on that first one and just checked however i also think it's important don't get caught up in the like jump to the thing you just maybe think it is there's still some other checks that you want to do now if this were in the dealership and i wasn't filming a video for you guys we would probably be 15 to 20 minutes in at this point in time based on everything that we've done so far especially if you remove playing around with all the electronics in the car because boy that's a lot of fun okay we're going to commit a bit of a sin here and i the curiosity is killing me so we're going to go ahead and take this valve cover off without talking to the customer shops don't ever do this once you start going into the engine you really want to make sure you're talking to your customer also because this has the short runner intake on it taking the valve cover off is super simple if this had the hole over the uh valve cover intake manifold the factory one and we'd had to put it in service position i probably wouldn't do this however i think with how easy this is or you know 15 bolts or something like that it's going to be easy enough to just pop this cover off and take yet another look to see what's going on okay so now that we have the valve cover off let's get our borescope down and see if we can get a better look at what's going on this is actually a pretty solid quality borescope for uh for like 150 bucks i'll throw a link down the description if you want to check it out as we slide here back past the exhaust cam and get oh my goodness all the way down we can actually see there's a broken link right there on the top how how kind of awesome is that boy there's a lot of cracked and broken stuff down here we would have a few choices obviously this is going to be a transmission out type of repair because we're going to be focusing on the bottom chain and the bottom end this is a highly modified car so at this point we would definitely want to pull the camshafts out do a cylinder leak down test i would probably just go ahead and pull the cylinder head off and send it to the machine shop get it checked this was a pretty low rpm situation where this failed however because it's been cranked and cranked a bunch and may run into a bent valve issue okay so i actually planned for that to be the ending of the video i even have the entire rest of the video completely edited however the curiosity to need to know more has been driving me insane so i decided to put my gloves back on and go a little bit deeper my initial plan is to drain all the engine oil and pull the oil pan that's a pretty easy straightforward thing to do that way we can evaluate any pieces and yuck down in the bottom end depending on what we find there i'll probably end up going ahead and pulling that upper timing cover off as well so that we can get a better look at what's going on behind those timing covers we won't see everything without the transmission completely out but i think we'll be able to get a better idea of the extent of the damage uh by doing those two things okay with our oil pan off you can see we got some chunkage here this is plastic right there what is this more plastic i'm guessing this is all bits of guide rail there's a bunch more plastic back there some pretty sizable chunks wow uh more back in here so a lot of plastic down in the pan i don't see any metal all right so as you can see we oh man i don't mean to laugh but jeez louise here's our timing chain just hanging down i couldn't really see too terribly much up here where the timing chain rides uh maybe it's time to break the bore scope back out and see what we got not really any metal in the pickup or plastic or anything like that so we're good there let's see what we can find with our bore scope okay so while we're at this level of apartness why don't we go ahead and pull our spark plugs out then what we can do is we can grab the borescope and drop the borescope down in the cylinders take a look and see if we can see anything really really catastrophic going on we'll go ahead and start with cylinder one this mark right here this is actually a recess cut in the piston but as you can see there's a bit of marking on the cylinder wall that could be of a concern well there's no bits of valve or anything laying in there let's move on to number two looks like our pistons pretty high up you can see right there on the right side of your screen those two little circles are exhaust valves which is okay because it looks like our cam is actually holding those exhaust valves open let's see if we can rotate that around i don't see anything major there move on to number three looks like three's got our intake valves open i'm not sure if that's impact damage here on the right from a valve or just a shiny spot from my light on the borescope again there's another spot where i can't quite tell if that's just a shiny spot or there was actually some impact damage well i don't see anything like completely obvious and glaring in these cylinders however i'm also not convinced that this bore scope is telling the full story all right we got the upper timing cover off and the upper timing cover looks pretty good nothing to really worry too terribly much about there let's drop our bore scope down behind our lower timing cover and see we got some scoring on that gear right there there's our busted link that looks like part of a gear right there i wonder if this gear this intermediate gear is the culprit oh yep it sure is right there look you can see that gear has just come apart dang sad look you can looks like there's some scoring on that cover there it's a metal that's part of that gear right there so i'm guessing that is a guide that broke or is that pin just laying there oh so that's just laying there i wonder if that bolt backed out or broke that's what caused all this carnage more of the gear down there clearly we're gonna need a whole timing set including both of these gears that's what so this crack right here this chunk missing is out of the lower timing cover you gotta hope at this point that there's no damage to the block because if there's damage to the block it's game over so i'm actually really glad that we went even deeper in it because we got to see some of that cool carnage up front whether it was that pin bolt breaking causing all the damage or whether it was a gear breaking really hard to tell my guess is that pin broke tumbled around broke the chain and caused all that damage really now at this point as far as i would be concerned the next step for this thing is engine out completely torn down full inspection every bearing every nut every bolt i wouldn't risk it on a high horsepower car honestly even on a stock car it's probably worth doing all that anyway but because this is a performance car definitely want to do it which stinks because we didn't even address the electrical gremlins that the car clearly has so i hope you stuck around for the ending here really cool stuff and uh unfortunately it's just a super bummer for the guy that owns it so i don't know i guess i'm gonna put it back together and let him decide whether he wants to rebuild it replace it what he's gonna do with that i'm out thank you guys for watching and i'll talk to you next time bye

Channel: HumbleMechanic

Views: 167,632

Rating: 4.9519768 out of 5

Keywords: r32, humblemechanic, humble mechanic, the humble mechanic, vw mechanic, r32 golf, vr6, vr6t, mk4 r32, vr6 engine, vr6 explained, mk4 golf, mk5 R32, best VW golf, 4 motion, how to buy a used car, used car buying guide, mk4 problems, mk4 r32 issues

Id: VQpU7TyiTFQ

Length: 24min 7sec (1447 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 10 2020