D'oh that'll teach me for half reading a post. Thinking that was your head in the photo above.

However iIf the stem is bent it often tends to free up as the engine warms. I know one occasion when the vehicle plant repeatedly reported a noise we couldn't detect due to a bent valve freeing up everytime we listened to it cause they kept warming the vehicle up for us to listen to.

Believe me it's a rare dealer that actually knows how an engine works let alone what caused it to fail. They wouldn't know root cause if it clubbed them over the head. Without seeing the stem itself I obviously can't comment on a manufacturing fault but if you have the valve I'd be happy to have a look and see how what state it's in. Spent a lot of time working with Valve suppliers over the last couple of years so whilst maybe not the biggest expert in the UK I'm very familiar with them.

My rule of thumb for warranty is:
Manufacturing faults occur before or at 1st service
After that it tends to be maintenance or design

I'm assuming the car was past the first service since you were the third owner
It's a rare manufacturing fault that gets out of 10,000 miles

 

I haven't got the valve unfortunately. The engine blew on my last car 4 years ago or so its ancient history now.

The only thing that prompted me to bring this up was Myste's photo of his engine which looked remarkably similar to mine.

 

Yeah as I said, I'm a muppet. Wasn't reading threads properly last night

Only thing is I'd be very circumspect about taking anything said by a dealer as correct. If I had to put a figure behind it I'd say less than 10% of what they actually believe is the cause is even close o the truth.

One of my jobs is to look at Field Technical Reports from Dealers/Distributors. These are problems they feel are significant enough to write detailed reports about and ask us to investigate. hey have to put an estimation of cause on the report. Rarely are they anywhere even close.

My favourite of all time which gives a classic example of their lack of understanding was where they said the bearings had failed in one position, the debris had dropped in the pan and then been drawn back through from the pan to damage the remaining bearings.

There's a slightly obvious reason that can't be true but I'll see if you guys can answer that one for me before I give you the answer

 

Something as simple as the oil filter? Or the position of the bearings in the oil feed meaning that all the debris would have had to go through various other parts of the engine before ending back up in the bearings?

Or did the engine seize when the first bearing failed?

 

Bingo!!!
Give the man a prize.
You've just proved you know more about engines than most dealers

There was another problem with the engine that I'm not going to go into. It's just one bearing went before the others

 

I should bloody hope so!



What's my prize.....

 

I'll send you a new intake valve as a spare