Loud noise on engine decel.. loose flywheel (sound of bad roller bearing almost)

[turboglenn]

ok, well today on my way to go work on a car for a guy my car made a weird noise on a free rev, so i did it again and it did it earlier and then by the time i was turning around it would do it just above idle and at idle, but only when the engine is decelerating. It doesn't sound like any rod or engine knock i've ever heard and there's no metal in my oil. I could almost hear the new heavy stock flywheel from the get-go on this AWD conversion, but this is drastically loud and scarrring me to even run the car.

here's the thing.. I had 5-6 miles to get back home.. you keep the foot on the gas and it will go to 6000+ RPM without making a noise at all, as soon as you let off the gas (in gear or in neautral/clutch disengagred) it's a horrible rattling grinding noise. I tool the stethescope to it and it's got to be either the flywheel loose or the bearings in one of the timing pulleys is REALLY bad but i doubt its those (it's that type of sound though, like a bad bearing on a pulley that's humming and shaking)

Since the trans has vibrated loose twice now i'm leaning towards the flywheel being loose. I rtorqued it and used loctite butit was only the blue loctite and i wasn't happy with the time frame of applying it to torqueing the bolts.

it can mimic any noise though, sound like a jumped rocker, sounds like a rod knock, but i can also feel it in the clutch pedal and hear it at both ends of the crank with the scope, but you don't hear it in the engine block like you would with a rod or main bearing being bad.

Can anyone confirm that this horrible sound only when the engine is decel'ing from revs be the flywheel or if it's possibly something else.. LIke i said, i'm fairly confident it's not an engine bearing, and if it is i'll find out when i go to tighten the flywheel, but before i tear the trans off i need to know that's where i'm chasing the problem at to begin with since my crippled up ass can't barely pull a trans and not be in agoney.

almost like a bad timing chain tensioner for anyone who's ever had a honda motorcycle and had that go bad.

to recap..

loud noise from #4 / bell housing area, ONLY on rev's decelerating car speed plays no role in it only that the engine revs and i let off the gas to make it start

engine is fine under load to any RPM i've tested to

started at high revs only and within a few minutes became audible at idle as well

sounds like something vibrating up against' something else and not like a spun bearing

have always heard the extra harmonics of the stock flywheel since the swap

trans has vibrated loose twice since the swap making me believe flywheel has vibrated loose just as easily

please help anyone who's had the flywheel vibrate loose or has had and fixed this sound..ITS LOUD

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update: this is the closest noise i can find while googling "loose flywheel bolts" and every varyiation of that and DSM combined, but this is the sound...

KA24de loose flywheel bolts - YouTube

is there anything that could be at "fault" on the flywheel or during the install to make it come loost like this since the trans has vibrated loose as well a couple times?

I hope i have more flywheel bolts if any of these are damaged, if not i guess i have to order some over night or something so i can get back to being mobile and working on the customer's karmann ghia i've been restoring to make money lately

the only thing that has me questioning it being flywheel bolts is that i just messed with the timing components for the valve replacement t-belt timing skip i had to fix a few weeks ago, but the bearings in the idler and tensioner pulley's felt fine, I just hope i go to the right cause first time around i can't afford to waste time

update: trans removed, 4 of the 6 flywheel bolts were barely more than hand tight. It took a wrench to turn them but only because of the leftover blue threadlock in the threads, one of them was visibly backed off from the flywheel about .007-.010" at best eyeball measurement

the dowel pin had started to come out as well, it's been tapped back in, the bolts are being cleaned and treated with a healthy dose od red loc-tite and will be re-torqued to the OEM spec 101-106 lb/ft

glad the problem was nothing major, still not happy i had to pull the trans though

 

[GRAVEDIGGER]

I feel your pain turboglenn. Glad you got it figured out and hopefully it will hold up with it retorqued with some red loctite.

 

[turboglenn]

talk about when it rains it pours, as soon as i got the engine and tans back together from the flywheel tightening i heard the nasty sound of a bad tensioner arise on first startup. PUlled the timing components and it had shaken the engine so much that the balancer had lost one bolt and the other 3 were loose and the eccentric pulley on the timing belt had loosened up, it was so slacked i'm surprised it didn't jump time on the way home yesterday, but she was all good, sompressed the tensioner and inserted pin, spun eccentric up and tightened and then pulled the pin and let it fly, she's all good again now

 

[GRAVEDIGGER]

Oh boy! Thank goodness the thing didn't jump time. Sounds like you saved the day for that guy.

 

[turboglenn]

tell me about it, some how the tensioner eccentric only gave up enough for the pulley to rotate partially back around and then stopped before giving up all the slack, so the tensioner hydraulic part was still working just ever so slighlty.

If it had gone that would have been the third time this season and thethird time ever in myu life with my own DSM of having any t-belt collision/failures period!!, now with all the other things coming into play as well like the flywheel loosening up, clutch disk exploded earlier in the season this has been the year for catching up on parts failures for me i guess