It's NOT a freakin twisting force that breaks dowel lands or cracks the rear plates near the oil pedestal. ITS EXPANSION FORCES on the combustion side of the engine. The combustion side tries to EXPAND OUT. Generally the rotor housing tries to bulge out sliding back and forth against the side housings. Adding gizmo's like solid plate oil pan/dry sumps doesn't help. Adding stronger bolts/studs that aren't over sized with machined plates DOESN'T HELP. Adding solid engine mounts DOESN'T Help this phenomenon. Adding dowels DOES help to some extent, but the material taken out can be an issue. The best solution is OVER SIZED MACHINED STUDS. As there is a shearing force applied to the dowel/tension bolts/studs. There's a lot of tolerance around the stock bolts and the sideways movement of the rotor housing apposed by the side housing creates a shearing action. The factory stuff has big tolerances so this movement is allowed to happen, were adding dowels puts a wrench in the shearing action, but material is removed from the plates to add dowels. This is were over sized studs come in as the engine can't shear those studs, therefor there is very little expansion movement allowed. Now.... whats the next weakest link? The ONLY twisting action acted on the engine would be between were the trans bolts to it, and were your engine mounts are. I see ZERO benefit to using any other bolts or studs unless they are over sized and the housings get machined. Why use stonger studs/bolts?? Whats the freakin point? Who's over torquing them to the point of failure and are they paying attention to the now dissorted rotor and houising clearances due to so much torque? I can see a slight over torque helping out here, but not to the point of a stock bolt failing, so whats the point of a none machine stud/bolt replacement when the stock stuff is adequate?

Its funny to see the same garbage repeated like a bunch of Parrats. Use your head people.

~Mike...........

 

You can see the holes were machined on the combustion side only.

 

Whoa! Thats the worst I've ever seen!

 

You can clearly see that only the studded portion survived lol. If all were bored and studed it would have disstributed the forces better. The non-studded portions were able to moves out (and hence crack almost straight across) because the stock tension bolts fit so loosly in their bores. I'm not saying the engine would have survived this obvious detonation/engine failure, but *might* have is all were bored/studed. Then again, it would have been on to the next weak link, whatever that might have been. I'm sure the rotors were dented amongst other destructions (like bearing and such).

~Mike.............

 

nothing else was damaged, just the rear plate......... even the ALS Seals survived.

 

* I goofed on this post, I should have said "if the extra dowel pins were so bad

edit: good info on this thread. Thanks racer for clearing up some of the misinformation in this thread including my own. I will make sure to call it what it is from now on and not be lazy about typing out the cause of this "phenomenon" that happens to our engines under extreme conditions and high horse power.

On a side note it would be interesting to hear if anyone has had any sort of problems with adding dowel pins because of the extra material taken out.

edit: damn you VWH for the god aweful side scroll!