The DMF on my 2006 Octy 2.0TDi DSG was replaced under warranty a year ago.

Today the car has been in for service having done about 18k in the last year and 55k in total. The garage (Parkview Reading) has advised that the DMF is noisy and should be replaced at a cost of £1100.

I said surely the part fitted a year ago was covered by warranty? The answer was no - the part was only covered up to the expiry of the manufacturers warranty on the car (which has long since expired). However if I pay the £1100 for a replacement then that would be covered for 2 years by the manufacturer. This seems totally inequitable and whilst the garage sympathised they just blamed Skoda rules etc.

Has anyone else encountered anything similar? Is it worth me contacting Skoda HQ direct or am I wasting my time?

Thanks

That is correct I'm afraid. But you could argue the car is not of suffient quality and durability, should it be needing over £2k worth of parts within a year? Think you need to approach the garage who done the work and Skoda otherwise its Small Claims Court, quite a lot of this happening now.

Same thing happened to me at a VW dealer recently.

Polo went in for a repair last year two months before the warranty expired, so fault was fixed FOC. Same part broke 10 months later and as I was already going to the garage for other major work - big service, cambelt change etc etc I mentioned that the bit they fixed last year was playing up again now and would be looking for a fix to be done FOC/under guarantee again.

Basically, if I had paid for the repair last year I would have got a two year guarantee, as I didn't pay because it was covered under warranty there seems to be no guarantee to the work. But as a goodwill gesture/repeat customer and I was about to spend hundreds (which ended being a grand at the end if the day!!!) they agreed to fix at no cost.

Try speaking to the garage who carried out the repair.

Good luck.

The DMF on my 2006 Octy 2.0TDi DSG was replaced under warranty a year ago.

Today the car has been in for service having done about 18k in the last year and 55k in total. The garage (Parkview Reading) has advised that the DMF is noisy and should be replaced at a cost of £1100.

I said surely the part fitted a year ago was covered by warranty? The answer was no - the part was only covered up to the expiry of the manufacturers warranty on the car (which has long since expired). However if I pay the £1100 for a replacement then that would be covered for 2 years by the manufacturer. This seems totally inequitable and whilst the garage sympathised they just blamed Skoda rules etc.

Has anyone else encountered anything similar? Is it worth me contacting Skoda HQ direct or am I wasting my time?

Thanks

Hello there, sorry, i know this doesn't help you but i have every sympathy for you with this. I recently had my dual mass flywheel repaired FOC under warranty

and i keep on hearing about people having this fault on VW group cars. I think its scandalous. It seems to me that a part not fit for purpose has been fitted to

a particular range of vw engines over a very significant period of time. I've never heard of this fault on any other manufacturers cars. People ask me at work about it

and i tell them about my car and they all say the same, 'that flywheel should never have failed on that age of car' or 'it sounds like its a weakness of your vehicle' or 'that's skodas for you' etc...etc

I just don't get how such an accomplished automotive engineering company can get such a vital engine part's design/construction so badly wrong! This flywheel clearly can't handle the torque/power of the

range of engines it is fitted to!

Maybe i'm speaking out of turn, and i know this has probably been done to death on here, but it winds me up when in this day and age, when cars cost so much money to buy, run and maintain, that faults like this re-occur frequently and end up costing people so much money and causing so much hassle.

Rant over!

Good luck with your flywheel.

Hi Sonko

I was quoted similar prices recently for replacing the DMF (and clutch) on my Octavia 1.9TDi. I did a little research and found that Valeo, who OEM various parts to VAG including clutches, make a suitable 4-piece conversion kit which replaces the DMF with a solid flywheel:

http://www.valeoservice.com/html/unitedkingdom/en/actualitesarchivesdetail.php?wid=165358215146C9C0533FCA7

Parts and fitting at Mr Clutch Kingston was £650 plus £50 for gearbox mounting bracket which wouldn't normally need replacing. It comes with a 2 year or 20K miles warranty and 4 follow-up checks over next 12K miles.

Clutch feels good and responsive and is indistinguishable from the old one. Nice and quite too.

I hope this helps...

I am not surprised to read about all the woes with Dual Mass Flywheels. If you "Google" it you will find numerous posts, mainly about failed VAG and Ford/Jaguar flywheels. Seems they are a necessary beast to smooth out the pulses of diesel engines and make them seem more driveable. One thing I can't understand, is they appear to fail from anything between very low (single figure thousands) mileage right up to starship mileages. Does not seem any logic in the failure mode. Anyway, to contribute to the thread I currently have a Mercedes A Class diesel and without boring everyone with all the detail, it needed a replacement DMF at under 20K miles - apparently a known problem area according to Mercedes. Fortunately the work was covered by warranty but when I enquired as to what it would cost me if the vehicle had been out of warranty I was told £2,300! This has been a major factor in my decision to part company with the Mercedes later this year, just before the warranty runs out and when my new petrol Octavia - now on order - arrives.

I have to say that they always coped fine with a nice heavy single mass flywheel before, so a DMF with the damping in the same direction as the main stress load on it, seems a bit of an odd way to do things.

From what I've read the DMF isn't really about smoothing the take up of drive as you release the clutch and is more about reducing the peak stress seen by the crank shaft.

From what I've read the DMF isn't really about smoothing the take up of drive as you release the clutch and is more about reducing the peak stress seen by the crank shaft.

That's good, because if it was for smoothing the take up of dive, it would be having the complete opposite effect.

In my experience a DMF makes for nasty take up, almost kangaroo like sometimes and very poor low revs use.

DMF's are mainly to reduce the effect of engine torque spikes reaching the transmission and causing excess wear to gearteeth. Comfort is also an issue.

DMF's are mainly to reduce the effect of engine torque spikes reaching the transmission and causing excess wear to gearteeth. Comfort is also an issue.

New gearbox £1000, new DMF £700.

I think I'd rather have a car that's good to drive and reliable and have to change the gearbox once in the life of the car, rather than change the DMF every so often. I think I'm on number 6 now, and I've been driving sympathetically towards it on purpose for the last few. I think I might well need number 7 soon, but will have to take the car in for that to be looked at.

New gearbox £1000, new DMF £700.

I can assure you that a new gearbox (i.e. not an exchange) will cost a lot more than £1000. A gearbox with all the teeth fretted due to torque spikes is basically scrap and would cost a fortune to rebuild. Moreover the torque spikes at engine start and stop (when they are greatest) can be sufficient to snap teeth. Using a DMF allows the gears to be reduced in size sufficiently to give a small enough 'box to fit in a small FWD car.

I am no fan of DMF's but they are a necessary evil with small high-torque high-compression diesels. To get through 7 doesn't sound right - something very wrong there.

i am just on with this problem £3.700 for gearbox & £500 for the flywheel oyeah dont 4get 2 add the vat

I can assure you that a new gearbox (i.e. not an exchange) will cost a lot more than £1000. A gearbox with all the teeth fretted due to torque spikes is basically scrap and would cost a fortune to rebuild. Moreover the torque spikes at engine start and stop (when they are greatest) can be sufficient to snap teeth. Using a DMF allows the gears to be reduced in size sufficiently to give a small enough 'box to fit in a small FWD car.

I am no fan of DMF's but they are a necessary evil with small high-torque high-compression diesels. To get through 7 doesn't sound right - something very wrong there.

I just had an in depth look, and you're not kidding on the boxes. £5k almost for a new one.

Things really have changed since the says of XUD when a box wasn't that expensive.

I agree there is something very wrong there and I have also had a new gear box after gear changes didn't work well after a DMF failure. It was before the box change that most of the failures occured and the current one has lasted around 30k miles.

All in all I think it's a right mess.

I have to say the O2J gearbox doesn't seem that small and I'm surprised the DMF can really help much more than a nice heavy SMF.

It's interesting to see that some manufacturers have moved away from the DMF so 4 piece SMF again, so there must be a way around it.

To be fair on the start/stop comment, I always have the clutch down, so that the gearbox is disengages as I was told it was good practice when learning to drive.

Either way, fecking evil things they are.

A gearbox with all the teeth fretted due to torque spikes is basically scrap and would cost a fortune to rebuild. Moreover the torque spikes at engine start and stop (when they are greatest) can be sufficient to snap teeth. Using a DMF allows the gears to be reduced in size sufficiently to give a small enough 'box to fit in a small FWD car.

I am no fan of DMF's but they are a necessary evil with small high-torque high-compression diesels.

I'm no mechanic, but I don't understand this. One starts and stops the engine with the gearbox in neutral, so there should be little in the way of gears connected to anything. On the other hand, in many situations, I can feel something juddering and seeming to undergo massive unrhythmic stresses. And one of those situations is several times a day creeping back uphill round a corner to get out of my drive with the car carrying some not anorexic ladies.

My gut feeling is that the DMF in my Octy is causing more stress than it can ever cure. I've never had problems with stalling in other cars, but I'm forever having to drop into first when weaving around potholes to avoid the sudden bang and stalled engine.

The whole vehicle seems too clever by half. It may be OK for a youngster, but not for someone like me for reliable transport in my dotage.