Garage wrecked my Range Rover engine… please help

[Bemmer]

So once the engine is eventually sorted the PH still has a 2016 90K mile RR Sport with £28,000 outstanding finance on it...

[nosha123]

Trevor555 said:

Your own private engineer? A proper garage?

You'll need a report from a garage, preferably a VAT registered one (I only say this as it seems to be the benchmark for warranty companies)

That report will be your evidence to support any demands/claim.

Send that report to the garage, give them an opportunity to rectify the problem, give them some sort of deadline.

Yes I had the car recovered to a 4x4 engine rebuild specialist and I paid him to inspect the engine and the various parts in the boot of the car.

He wrote:
"Vehicle recovered into us with the engine in a heavily stripped state.
1.Centre induction & supercharger removed.
2.Camshaft fixings all loose & timing chains removed.
3.Rear of car filled with stripped engine parts.
Work carried out to carry out inspection.
1.Unable to rotate engine fully by hand in either direction.
2.Camera put down spark plug holes. Damage found on rear two cylinders on l/h bank.
3.L/h cylinder head removed. 3 valves found with heads broken off & consequential damage to pistons & cylinder head.
4.Engine will now rotate by hand.
5.In our opinion because of unknown procedures carried out from previous garage we would be recommending replacement engine."

Garage 2 told me verbally they had installed the new timing chain - but this was also not true and the part does not appear on the invoice I paid them for the time they spent dismantling.

[SturdyHSV]

nosha123 said:

The engine seized, according to my own private engineer, because they manually rotated the engine backwards whilst it still had the slack timing chain installed....
The pistons and valves all then smashed on the cylinder head and broke off leaving the engine completely seized.

What does your engineer conceive they rotated the engine backwards with? Another engine?

Manually turning an engine over by hand, forwards or backwards, you are simply not going to generate the requisite force to 'smash' the valves into the pistons and break them in to pieces, and even if you did manage to generate some decent force and continued pushing through the sudden enormous increase in resistance, at the very best you'd bend a couple of valves a bit and I strongly suspect you would not then continue rotating the engine over again and again to then get on to the next piston stroke and then 'smash' the somehow broken off bits in to the head.

I would also be very surprised if there was little enough slack in the timing chain that the car ran, but enough slack that rotating it backwards (which will make barely any difference to piston to valve clearance) to then put the valves into the pistons.

Being hand rotated, the pistons would also be extremely unlikely to 'break off'.

Not much completely seizes an engine. It tends to be spinning a bearing as it then wedges itself between the crank journal and the other half of the bearing.

You said they sent you a video of it running with the slack timing chain? Had they disassembled it enough to inadvertantly remove the oil pump pickup, or the drive to the oil pump, and have ultimately run it with no oil pressure and thus spun some bearings and seized it?

[Responder.First]

Bemmer said:

So once the engine is eventually sorted the PH still has a 2016 90K mile RR Sport with £28,000 outstanding finance on it...

Isn't a RR Sport SVR that's the only 2016 5.0 I can see, might be worth that in which case.


Sounds like Thor and hammer spun that lump to do that damage!

[nosha123]

SturdyHSV said:

You said they sent you a video of it running with the slack timing chain? Had they disassembled it enough to inadvertantly remove the oil pump pickup, or the drive to the oil pump, and have ultimately run it with no oil pressure and thus spun some bearings and seized it?

The private engineer did then say verbally to me when I went to see the car at his garage, that the level of damage of the broken pistons or valves (Ic ant recall which and am not a tech person Sorry!), were smashed and that Garage 2 must have revved the engine significantly to break them and cause such damage to the cylinder head.

And yes - in the videos I have from garage 2.. the engine is running and they show the slack timing chain only slightly visible down a hole so assume that is via the oil pump thing you refer to. I can post video here if it helps

[PistonTim]

Secondhand engine that is tested and warrantied as much as possible fitted by another specialist and move on.

You have very little chance of any claim especially not having driven it around.

[Volvo1956]

I thought you said your expert witness told you the damage was caused by the engine being turned manually backwards.

Now you say the expert witness is saying the engine must have been revved very hard!!!!

With conflicting stories like that I'd certainly give up seeking any type of compensation which I believe is a lost cause and source and second hand lump from a reputable source.

[BlackStang5point0]

5l turbo you sure about that..??

[Matt_T]

I supsect that you're not going to agree with me, but if I was in this situation, I'd flog the car as spares, buy a reliable shed for £2000 and do everything I can to pay off that £28k finance.

There's no way on earth I'd start spending money on this car with that much debt.

...but that's just me

[MustangGT]

How long have you owned your 5.0 supercharged RRS?

[nosha123]

BlackStang5point0 said:

5l turbo you sure about that..??

Uh yes.. why do you doubt it???

Have you not heard of them before?
They are made by Land Rover.

And they are a super car (not the SVR one which stands for SPECIAL VEHICLE)

[nosha123]

I think I'm done thanks chaps... thanks!

I can tell I'm in a very male dominated environment by the tone of the majority of these posts... (not all I hasten to add but the grown ups seem to be in the minority here)

A lot of you seem to come on here to take the piss and belittle people, in an effort to make you feel better about your own day and to boost your egos.

That isn't an environment I enjoy being around... so thanks for your contributions... I was hoping - given the name of the site - that some of you might have technical engine experience and could verbalise that - but a lot of you resorted to cheap shots and sarcasm.. which I think says a lot about you...

Byeeeeeeee

(oh and just a little tip from a female who you probably perceive as dumb and stupid, and out of my depth... if you have nothing nice to say.. then shut the fk up)

[idealstandard]

This forum is becoming a really sad place - people just come here to mock and belittle others and relish in others misfortune, pretty awful really.

[rallycross]

Usually the cheapest option in these situations is a good 2nd hand engine with a guarantee (you never get much guarantee other than its working correctly when fitted by a vat registered garage),

As the engine was in a damaged state when dropped off its virtually impossible to put any blame on the garage where it failed as it was already failing.

I would ring round a few land rover specialists to see if you can get a good complete 2nd hand engine, getting a complete used engine with as much as possible left on the engine is cheaper than getting a bare engine with no ancillaries which then needs extra work for the garage fitting it (things like injectors, sensors, turbo's etc - best find a complete engine with all the parts still on it).

[carreauchompeur]

Epic flounce. Nobody has belittled you (except for the slightly beardy posts about turbo/supercharger) we have merely pointed out the huge flaws that you would find out anyway, expensively, in court if you chose to pursue this.

[Gastons_Revenge]

I don't think anyone thought you were female, you weren't being treated differently this is just PH. Hell of a flounce though

[poppopbangbang]

It's likely jumped timing on one bank due to the slack chains, the "running like a tractor" was where the damage had already occured, likely a bent valve/s

They'll have wanted to compression test it to confirm this.

Unfortunately one valve will have broken as a result of continuing to run it, it will have locked up due to the remains of this valve stopping the piston in the cylinder it dropped in reaching TDC.

It was already a head off job by the time it got there and likely an engine given the probable damage to the piston crown in the failed cylinder. Continuing to run it for diagnostics or any other reason has increased the amount of damage present once the head/s was/were off but it would have been rebuild or replace time regardless the second it started misfiring.


Edited to add: Well that post was mostly pointless then

[Roger Irrelevant]

SturdyHSV said:

Manually turning an engine over by hand, forwards or backwards, you are simply not going to generate the requisite force to 'smash' the valves into the pistons and break them in to pieces, and even if you did manage to generate some decent force and continued pushing through the sudden enormous increase in resistance, at the very best you'd bend a couple of valves a bit and I strongly suspect you would not then continue rotating the engine over again and again to then get on to the next piston stroke and then 'smash' the somehow broken off bits in to the head.

I would also be very surprised if there was little enough slack in the timing chain that the car ran, but enough slack that rotating it backwards (which will make barely any difference to piston to valve clearance) to then put the valves into the pistons.

Glad you said this; surely if there is sufficient slack in a timing chain that running the engine backwards will wreck it, then unless you're super super lucky running it forwards would wreck it too wouldn't it? Sounds like a load of ste to me.

Edit: christ that escalated a bit while I was typing!

Edited by Roger Irrelevant on Thursday 27th June 15:34

[grudas]

nosha123 said:

I think I'm done thanks chaps... thanks!

I can tell I'm in a very male dominated environment by the tone of the majority of these posts... (not all I hasten to add but the grown ups seem to be in the minority here)

A lot of you seem to come on here to take the piss and belittle people, in an effort to make you feel better about your own day and to boost your egos.

That isn't an environment I enjoy being around... so thanks for your contributions... I was hoping - given the name of the site - that some of you might have technical engine experience and could verbalise that - but a lot of you resorted to cheap shots and sarcasm.. which I think says a lot about you...

Byeeeeeeee

(oh and just a little tip from a female who you probably perceive as dumb and stupid, and out of my depth... if you have nothing nice to say.. then shut the fk up)

to be fair a lot of people have said "you damaged by driving it more" it's unfortunate and range rovers are known to be very unreliable with plenty of serious engine problems.

while the orange light on paper means you can drive it, the reality is that garage 1 should have advised you to get it trailer to garage 2 or what ever, so if you yourself aren't technically minded, I'd garage 1 is the one who is most at fault for not telling to avoid driving it.

[Responder.First]

idealstandard said:

This forum is becoming a really sad place - people just come here to mock and belittle others and relish in others misfortune, pretty awful really.

Agreed there is a pack mentality and people do seem to bang on being negative, even after you have conceded.

You can see that in many of speed plod law threads, sadly people seem to have very little time if you have made a mistake or gotten a situation wrong.

I do think the OPs case does sound very difficult, I would be gutted too if I had a 10k engine bill, I just think its going to be very hard to prove the garage made it worse while trying to work on the vehicle.