I own a Ford S-Max 1.8 Turbo Diesel 07 plate.

Out of the blue the engine started to make a very unpleasant noise! And started having slight loss of power issues. It sounded like extremely loud tappets, and the sound got quicker when i revved the car.

So i took it down to the mechanic that i use straight away. He took the head off, and thought that it was the pistons maybe hitting the valves, as some of the valves looked damaged. Sorry its brief, im not mechanically minded! So the head was sent away to be reset or whatever needs to be done, and some valves replaced.

The mechanic got the head back, rebuilt it, and guess what, no change!

He says now that it must be the bottom end of the engine, and it may be easier to replace the engine! Obviously thats going to be very, very expensive, and if anyone could give me some advice on the best thing to do next, it would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks in advance.

i would ask in the dedicated smax forum for some real insight into your problem.

first thing i would do is get to another garage as you could spend a lot of money on the 'if its not this it must be that' way of mechanics, without inspection its difficult to say whats wrong as it could be anything from a noisy tensioner through to knocking injectors, but a good garage should be able to diagnoise the problem.