My transmission has not been changing gears very well for the past year or so. Hard shifts mostly. After reading what might be causing the problem, I went through with ordering a valve body from Revmax. I felt comfortable with it based on the feedback that I read. I received the valve body and needed to keep the box and packaging so I could send mine back get my core charge. I don't have pictures as I deleted them accidentally. It was not that bad of job to do and if you confident in your mechanical skills, you should be able to do it. There is plenty of help on the internet to assist you.
I completed replacing my valve body in my transmission and was testing it when I heard some disturbing noises (load clacking) coming from the engine. It seemed to be coming from the top of the engine under the valve cover. I was not really sure what it was so I started the process of removing my valve cover and found the pad for the cam chain tensioner broke apart. After a little research, I found that VW did not sell the pads individually. I had to buy the whole tensioner at a price of about $700 each and there are two (one each bank). I figured that the other side was not far from wearing out. So to the internet I went and found pads for about $25 a pair (two per tensioner) on eBay. I took a chance and bought two pair along with valve cover gasket kit to start this job.
This is not meant to be a how to do this job. It is just my experience of doing this. I do not have the time to take pictures all the way through these processes.
So I started removing valve covers and everything that needed to be removed.
This is passenger side bank.
I removed the coil packs and air cleaner box to make some room.
There are a lot of tubes that will need to be moved to remove the valve cover
The cam chain tensioner on the passenger side is in the back of the engine where the tensioner for the driver side in is the front. This is a picture of the passenger side.
Camshafts in place on driver side.
Camshafts in place on the passenger side.
You will need to remove the timing belt so I marked it so that I would reinstall it with the same orientation.
You will also need to remove the cam sensor for each intake cam. Passenger is in the front and driver is in the rear.
You will need to have the cam lock bar which fits onto the flange you can see here for both exhaust cams when removing the timing belt. These sprockets will need to be removed.
Driver side sprocket removed. The tensioner is in the upper left of the picture below.
Then you can start removing the caps that hold the cam in place. You will need to remove both cams on the driver side to get the tensioner out. I tried not to take both cams out but it was not happening.
Once the cams were out on the driver side along with the tensioner, you can see the marks made by the cam chain on the head. That is not supposed to be there. Otherwise it was pretty clean. I fished all the broken pieces from the head which I felt I was lucky to do.
This was the top pad.
This was the bottom pad. It was still in place when I removed the tensioner.
After removing the cams and tensioner, I realized it had jumped a couple teeth when the pad failed.
Below is the wear the chain created on the tensioner. Pretty ugly.
Then of course I needed to get the passenger side apart also.
Below is the wear that was on the passenger side tensioner pads. They were intact.
I did not want to buy new tensioner because I am cheap. So I welded the damaged tensioner to fill in the groves that were created from the chains. I then ground them to shape it.
This is the finished product with a new pad installed. Works for me.
Ready to install back into the engine.
The difference of a new pad and the passenger side old pad.
Passenger side cams and tensioner installed.
Driver side cams and tensioner installed.
From here, I just put everything else back together. I have been driving this fix now five months. About 10,000 miles. I believe it was a success.
