VANOS Splined Shaft Bearing Ring Scoring

[nagholdoian]

Hello! Not super active on the forums but I thought I'd share my current VANOS rebuild and Beisan experience, specifically the scoring I saw while doing the rattle kit.

While I was taking apart the splined shafts to inspect their condition, I noticed the rings looked pretty scored and indented. I reached out to Raj at Beisan Systems about this and he mentioned the stock rings are made of very soft steel which causes them to wear pretty substantially creating those indentations. He said the rings in his rattle repair kit are made from hardened, bearing steel and ground to bearing standards, so they won't wear out. Pretty interesting to see how bad these things got. Car has ~128k miles, so not super high. I've included some pictures of my rings as well as the Beisan ones for comparison. Happy VANOS fixing and shout out to Raj for the insight as well as the great products he makes!

Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk

[Tbonem3]

Cool, save them in case you get married!

[sapote]

I assume the scored rings with groove inside and not outside the rings, caused by the disks rubbing on the ring. This could mean the cam is not centered to the VANOS piston, IOW the Vanos was not aligned to the head properly.

with the Vanos aligned, the 2 shafts of the spline bearing should be concentric and minimum rubbing on the inside of the rings. The main purpose of the ring is a spacer for the threaded cap.

[BL92]

Should my spline shafts have this much play?

https://streamable.com/cw989g

.....

I have been kinda rough rocking and pulling on the vanos to seperate it off the dowels / head

...

[maupineda]

Side play is normal, but mine had no play fore/aft

[jayjaya29]

https://beisansystems.com/s54-vanos-rattle-procedure/

[sapote]

1) Should my spline shafts have this much play?

https://streamable.com/cw989g

.....

2) I have been kinda rough rocking and pulling on the vanos to seperate it off the dowels / head

...

1) With this much axial plays on the bearings, I'm very surprised if the car didn't have vanos rattling issue. It looks very bad.

2) I don't think this caused the bearing plays.

[BL92]

Thanks for responding and helping me out,

Yer rattles pretty bad, multiple oil changes quieten them down though

The rattle is bad at 1st start up once the oil drains out IE : after oil change or when doing vanos work etc then is silent after a 10 seconds

I have no forward or reverse play, just up down - side to side

[sapote]

Thanks for responding and helping me out,

Yer rattles pretty bad, multiple oil changes quieten them down though

The rattle is bad at 1st start up once the oil drains out IE : after oil change or when doing vanos work etc then is silent after a 10 seconds

I have no forward or reverse play, just up down - side to side

I thought I saw lots of fore/aft plays in the video; if zero plays on fore/aft axis then it should not cause vanos rattling.

What you heard rattle is due to lack of oil pressure after draining.