Hi all,
I think I heard the dreaded piston slap again the other morning. Car is MY98 with new short engine 15K miles ago. I believe it is an MY99 unit - is this prone to piston slap the same way as the MY98. The engine is treated with respect, so I was somewhat gutted. The other issue is that at 59K miles the warranty is about to expire and to extend(and pay full service costs) looks like £580 + £450 which is hard to justify.
Why are these cars so fragile?

 

Are you sure it's the piston slap sound? Go here,

 

Hi WREXY,

I lived with it for 20K before the short motor, so I know the noise - only present when cold and not the wastegate solenoid noise which is a fixed frequency! Also prior to this Scooby life rebuilt the odd Alpina engine with Cosworth pistons which can slap with the recommended generous clearances.

 

Oh dear, Guido. Come on chaps, anybody know of any MY99/00s with piston slap then?

Cheers,

WREXY.

 

No sorry, havnt heard any cases of it on MY99/00's

Tony

 

There were a lot of changes done 98my to 99my, anyone know when they went from phase one to two?
That might tell us whether you've got a my99 or not.
Ron

 

I'm with Ron on this one. I have a turbo registered 1st Aug 98. Should I be worried? I've always found that the two turbos I've had sound like no other car on start-up anyway. The recording on the site is hard to compare. I often wish I'd never read about the goddam piston slap thing!!! Then I wouldn't be worried.

If you have it are there symptons like loss of power, huge oil consumption, poor economy that p*ss you off? The sound of a flat four cold will always be different. I know mine still goes like stink, doesn't use oil between services, and does the same old crap MPG that we all accept.

Advice?

 

Hi all

I'm pretty sure that the phase two engines fitted from my99 on have more bolts holding the engine to the gearbox than the earlier phase one engines,but this would mean that Guido cannot have a my99 short engine fitted to his my98.Can anybody confirm/deny this?.

As for the piston slap common on my97/98s being a reliability issue,quite simply it isn't !!.It just means the engine is noisy for the first few minutes after starting and may also be slightly noisy when warm.There are plenty of high mileage MY97/98s about that have exhibited piston slap from low mileage and not had a problem.I,ve also never heard of a piston failure on a piston slap car on here.

When people talk about the dreaded piston slap it conjures up images of the piston flailing about inside the engine ripping chunks out of the bore and nobody likes to think their car is anything less than mechanically perfect.
In actual fact the running clearance of a healthy piston is only a couple of thousanths of an inch.In an engine with piston slap this will have gone up slightly. To put this into perspective a newspaper page is about three thousanths of an inch thick,a human hair about 2 thou thick.

My dealer told me that the new piston (no 4) fitted to my car under warranty was 60 microns larger than the original ,that's 2.5 thou bigger.

In my opinion the piston slap is more of an annoyance than a sign of impending failure and a big repair bill.

Andy