Horrible vibration!!

[Simonspryer]

Hi everyone! I have a mk2 focus 1.8 tdci and it vibrates on acceleration. It does it at standstill when you rev or whilst you are on the move. 

I have had the car in the air and checked movement in the dog bone, I have levered the driver side and passenger side engine mounts and found no excessive movement, I have also jacked the engine whilst running and the vibration is still there. I thought the dmf but there is no difference with clutch up or down. The engine does wobble slightly on tick over. Would timing out by a tooth do this? There is plenty of power and the turbo kicks in nicely. Can anyone help at all? Many thanks Simon

[FatHead1979]

23 hours ago, Simonspryer said:

Hi everyone! I have a mk2 focus 1.8 tdci and it vibrates on acceleration. It does it at standstill when you rev or whilst you are on the move. 

I have had the car in the air and checked movement in the dog bone, I have levered the driver side and passenger side engine mounts and found no excessive movement, I have also jacked the engine whilst running and the vibration is still there. I thought the dmf but there is no difference with clutch up or down. The engine does wobble slightly on tick over. Would timing out by a tooth do this? There is plenty of power and the turbo kicks in nicely. Can anyone help at all? Many thanks Simon

The 1.8 TDCi does naturally seem to generate more vibrations than the 1.6 and 2.0 TDCi units, although clearly if it's as you've described then something isn't right.  The engine mounts are a common culprit for this type of problem but if you've had the engine jacked up and it was still doing it then I'd be surprised if it was being caused by the mounts because jacking the engine up should have taken the strain off the mounts.

I'm not sure on the belt question, although I'm sure some of the more knowledgeable folk such as @stef123 @iantt @Tdci-Peter will be along fairly shortly to help out.

[Tdci-Peter]

Post deleted due to incorrect Quote

[Tdci-Peter]

On 1/14/2018 at 9:03 PM, Simonspryer said:

I thought the dmf but there is no difference with clutch up or down. The engine does wobble slightly on tick over. Would timing out by a tooth do this? There is plenty of power and the turbo kicks in nicely

It is not really my field, Stef or Ian would probably know a lot more then me.

But I think the DMF would clank or rattle if it was bad, with the noise being more audible near the passenger side wheel arch. If it has always done it since you have had it, maybe someone has replaced the DMF with a solid flywheel. These can give more vibration, that is what the DMF is for.

The belt timing will affect all cylinders equally, and I would have thought it would affect power more than induce vibration. And fuel economy would suffer. You should get about 50MPG unless you are doing a lot of urban stop-start journeys.

I would look at cylinder balance with a diagnostic tool. Maybe one injector is bit out of calibration. Though when I looked at cylinder balance on my 1.8 using Forscan, it gave identical readings on all 4, that did not change, so it looked like the reading was not working properly. Though that was some time ago, and I have not re-tested it.

Does it pull smoothly when rolling along at idle RPM, not touching the throttle, in 1st, 2nd & 3rd gears? Mine is quite happy to do that even with a heavy load and undulating track in 1st & 2nd, and ok on a flat road in 3rd. That is quite a test for injector balance, any cylinder imbalance should be evident by rough running or uneven firing note.