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I'd been looking for a good used TDI for years when I lucked out finding one for sale right down the street from where I live earlier this year. It was a 98, one lady owner, Jetta TDI with sunroof & only 82K. I was excited. A friend who owns 2 TDIs came over and drove it and all seemed good. I bought it for $3500. A few months later a friend was driving it when the clutch pedal went to the floor & stayed! Seemed like it was the clutch master cylinder to me but my Brazilian mechanic friend with not so good English (who's usually pretty good!) told me he was sure it was the clutch itself. So I bought a whole new clutch set and rear seal from TDI-Parts and had him put them all in for ca. $700+/- total parts & labor (cheap for a clutch job!) The old ones looked suspiciously good still. And wouldn't you know it, a month or so later, w/ no advance warning, it failed again in exactly the same way--I lost all clutch pedal. So this time I had the master and slave clutch cylinders replaced like I should have in the beginning. I took a summer road trip from Maryland all the way to the annual EAA Expo in Oshkosh WI and then on to Omaha NE to start my daughter in college. In Oshkosh my clutch failed again in the very same way! I drove 40 miles from Oshkosh to Appleton shifting all the way w/o a clutch (which I learned how to do driving VW bugs & vans in the 70s!) to a VW dealer there and paid $600 (including a rental for 3 days) to replace the brand new clutch master cylinder I had just put in! (It turned out to have been defective from the factory and I eventually got my $125 back for it!) In the meantime my TDI had been leaking oil like a sieve ever since my clutch job. It was clearly coming from the rear main seal that I hadn't noticed leaking before replacing it during the clutch job. The only obvious reasons were either my new rear seal was also somehow defective or had been somehow boogered during installation. Well, I've continued to drive it on several more road trips, most recently to Atlanta and back. It runs great. Gets 43-44 mpg at full hiway speeds and the oil leak is beginning to slow. But in the meantime I've noticed something else that alerts me to a more likely explanation for the cause of the oil leak. I'd noticed oil leaking around my oil cap for some time but stupidly didn't make the connection till recently. The oil cap gasket is still good but clearly oil is forcing it's way out. Then I realized the same was probabaly true of my rear main seal leak. It suddenly dawned on me that I must be have a bad ring or more, in one or more of my cylinders that was creating excessive pressure within my engine case (instead of just in the heads) which was forcing oil out thru the points of least resistance--my new rear main seal and oil cap. This is as far as I've gotten in my troubleshooting so far. Since it continues to run so well and the oil leak has slowed (but no way stopped) and I'm so cash strapped--I'm delaying having a very expensive ring job done. Am changin my oil more often to compensate for accelerated oil contamination thru blowby down into my case. Would appreciate any words of wisdom from anyone that reads this and has any words of experience or knowledge to share.
Thanks a lot...! -Larry
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