Greetings folks, I finally have my Q3 relatively road worthy, but as a result have uncovered an engine issue. It does not run smoothly and appears to misfire on some cylinders. I have good compression on all of them but discovered play in the crankshaft pulley. It moves about 1/8-inch with the engine stationary. See the image from the parts manual. This tells me that there is play in the shaft on the front of the crankshaft that drives the distributor drive gear, so the ignition timing is most likely bouncing around. I have not yet checked that with a timing light, but regardless, this play has to be fixed. Based on what I see in the manuals, it is either wear on the splines on the shaft that drives the distributor drive (19), splines on the shaft that drives the outer shaft (18) or play in the drive gear splines on the crankshaft (6). Before I start to disassemble the engine, I wanted to cheek to see if there was a knowledge of or experience with this issue out there. Thanks in advance. Marc Trahan Crank play - YouTube
