rampage
Veteran Member
I did find a couple other threads on this, but not too many responses so I thought I'd ask it again:
I'm changing the rear main seal on my 1998 Jetta TDI. I understand from reading on here that they can either be the 'traditional' rubber/spring type, or they can be teflon/PTFE. My crank has a pretty decent groove in it from the old seal, so I read that a teflon replacement is the way to go. I got one from a local supply house, and it didn't look like rubber, and didn't have a spring. Only one problem (well, 2 problems) the 2 oil pan bolt holes in the bottom of the seal were much larger than the oil pan bolts that are supposed to go in them. Also, the holes for the 'shield' bolts (the shield that goes between the RMS and the flywheel,) it looked like the guy running the tap had a bad day, all the threads had flat tops and one of them would not even tighten up hand tight before slipping. (The oil pan bolt holes looked like they could have been a full size bigger, not a result of poor machining...)
So, I guess this is a 2 part question:
1. Has anyone ever gotten a rear main seal and had to use different sized oil pan bolts? My oil pan bolts look to be stock, they're the weird bolts that are both allen and metric 6 point socket drive... I couldn't imagine someone would helicoil all 20 of them anyway..
2. What's a good place to get a RMS from and how you can be sure it's Teflon and the bolt holes will be the right size? I see them priced from ~$20 (tdiparts) all they way up to ~$110, (impex, advertised as 'new design...) However, even the 'cheap' one on the impex site looks the same as what I got from the local place...
On a side note, I'm about getting fed up with the local VW parts place (I won't mention any names... , The convenience of buying locally isn't worth the extra price if they can't even get stuff right... They also gave me the wrong trans output seals, so now I'm going on week 3 of driving the gas guzzler to work.
I'm changing the rear main seal on my 1998 Jetta TDI. I understand from reading on here that they can either be the 'traditional' rubber/spring type, or they can be teflon/PTFE. My crank has a pretty decent groove in it from the old seal, so I read that a teflon replacement is the way to go. I got one from a local supply house, and it didn't look like rubber, and didn't have a spring. Only one problem (well, 2 problems) the 2 oil pan bolt holes in the bottom of the seal were much larger than the oil pan bolts that are supposed to go in them. Also, the holes for the 'shield' bolts (the shield that goes between the RMS and the flywheel,) it looked like the guy running the tap had a bad day, all the threads had flat tops and one of them would not even tighten up hand tight before slipping. (The oil pan bolt holes looked like they could have been a full size bigger, not a result of poor machining...)
So, I guess this is a 2 part question:
1. Has anyone ever gotten a rear main seal and had to use different sized oil pan bolts? My oil pan bolts look to be stock, they're the weird bolts that are both allen and metric 6 point socket drive... I couldn't imagine someone would helicoil all 20 of them anyway..
2. What's a good place to get a RMS from and how you can be sure it's Teflon and the bolt holes will be the right size? I see them priced from ~$20 (tdiparts) all they way up to ~$110, (impex, advertised as 'new design...) However, even the 'cheap' one on the impex site looks the same as what I got from the local place...
On a side note, I'm about getting fed up with the local VW parts place (I won't mention any names... , The convenience of buying locally isn't worth the extra price if they can't even get stuff right... They also gave me the wrong trans output seals, so now I'm going on week 3 of driving the gas guzzler to work.