Dealer wot fix piston slap

Well we can't hear it to judge but some piston slap is considered normal on a lot of engines from different manufacturers. Doesn't really seem to affect long term engie life. Yours might be worse than normal though so you are right to be concearned.

Have a couple more dealers check it out and keep the paperwork from all of them in case your engine does suffer from long term problems.

Steve B.

Cannot say what you should do but my experience was: I have a 96 Chevy pickup I bought new. Noticed piston slap the first cold morning (several months after buying it - bought in April in Texas so first cold morning (in the 40's) wasn't until Oct or Nov). Went to dealer 5+ times as they "couldn't hear anything wrong". Dropped it off the night before and went in early to demonstrate the noise and they basically said no problem. They all do that. I now have 129K miles on it and it may be a bit worse but still running fine (regarding no oil burning or any other major engine symptom but this truck has had more problems than any other vehicle I have ever owned).

I have used Mobil 1 since 20K miles or so and change regularly and don't drive it too hard (do pull a 4000# trailer on occasion but "trucks" are supposed to do that). Still have the original automatic tranny if that tells anyghing about how hard I drive it as I know many of these failed early. Under these conditions I planned on the motor (short block anyway) to easily run 200K miles and should get close to 300K. After hearing the noises for the first time that first winter, I doubted it would make 100K but right now I think it may make it to the 200K mark.... we'll see.

Good luck with yours.

bb

Early and frequent engine problems are "normal" on the GM 3.1 V6. "Normal" means it happens to most examples of the engine, most of the time. It is not a good engine. If all yours is doing is making a little noise, consider yourself fortunate.

DS

The vast majority of the 3.1 engines are fine engines. Have your dealer print the tsb out for you so you can read it. If I recall correctly, it instructs them about what is and is not normal noise.

You have to fight the b*astards without giving up.

GM has programmed the dealers to deny that it's an issue. If you keep pressing the issue then they might offer to extend your warranty a few years. Keep fighting and they'll eventually cave in and do a buyback. You'll probably need a lawyer.

There's plenty of info on the web that should help you with a strategy.

"davefr" wrote

Oh please....he will be wasting his time. Unless the noise doesn't go away after a specified length of time....they aren't going to fix it. We deal with these engines "all the time" at our dealership. First thing that has to happen is to have the engine "cold start" tested by a foreman. If it lasts longer then a specified interval, we will fix it. If it goes away within a couple of minutes...it's normal (as are most of the these cold start engine noises).

A lot of the newer engines exhibit this behaviour. Hell, even a lot of the older engines did. I used to replace lot's of 2.0 liter

4 cylinder GM engine pistons a number of years back. When I worked at a Chrysler dealership years ago, we replaced pistons on the 3.3 v-6's like there was no tomorrow. A few weeks ago, I replaced a set of pistons on a 2003 Cadillac Deville. Northstars rarely give any piston noise problems, but now all of a sudden it's an epidemic on the late model engines. It rarely does any damage to the engines (the cold start noise)....just is an annoyance to the customer.

Ian

"Joseph A. Zupko" wrote

How long does the noise last? If it only lasts for a few minutes..you are out of luck. They won't replace the pistons unless the noise is there after about 10 minutes of running.

Newsflash: TSB's do not mean "warranty" or that the dealership is forced to perform the repair.

Ian

Our 2000 Malibu had piston slap but as said it went away within a minute so the dealer couldn't fix it (they had GM rep listen to it) . Never got worse by the time we traded at 98k kms. My niece had the same model and when she took it in to say it was noisy they just told her they were going to replace the whole engine. Apparently hers was quite noisy. My salesman (former mechanic) told me that even if GM replaced the pistons they used the old rings etc.

"shiden_Kai" ( snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com) writes: > "davefr" wrote

The real problem is that saying 'they all do that' doesn't count as 'educating the customer.'

You, the customer, vote for politicians. Politicans pass laws that demand particular corporate average fuel economy numbers (CAFE) and low emissions standards. You as a customer still demand power and torque, so tiny engines aren't an answer. One answer is to build engines that have less friction, tighter cylinder sealing when cold and during warm-up, and therefore both better efficiency and lower emissions. One way to do THAT is to use pistons that do not expand much with increasing temperature (hypereutectic alloy) and can thus be fitted much tighter in the cylinder when cold. Of course, you still demand that the car be affordable, which means that the manufacturer now has to deal mass-producing an engine that requires a maximum of .002 inches clearance on all cylinders rather than .004. So what do you get? A certiain percentage of engines that have a cylinder or two a tad out of spec, and so they make a little noise until the piston does warm up and expand its tiny amount that it does grow.

"David J and Lynne J Shepherd" wrote

In all honesty....I'm extemely un-impressed with the way that GM is handling many of their quality issues right now. We are simply getting overrun with an unbelievable amount of warranty repairs....intake gaskets, noisy pistons, and front diff failures on trucks come to mind. GM's quality control is at an all time low right now. Unfortunately, I can't do anything about it, and I know exactly how they deal with the customers about the problems as I see if every day. I suppose some customers might get some satisfaction by sueing GM. But really, the problems are so widespread in the product that you might just as well buy another brand if you don't want to deal with the problems. And then, you simply open up another kettle of fish.

In the meantime, about all I can do is inform folks about what is "happening" at the dealership level so they don't waste too much time worrying about issues that won't/can't be resolved by GM.

Ian

I used to think Nissan sucked because they were selling cars with engines that had this problem - you could pull the car out of Sales and into the Service department to have the piston slap problem cured. Well, at least they were fixing the problem when it occurred...GM isn't even doing that. Sad.