Volkswagen EA827

Volkswagen's classic four — the engine that outlasted almost everything around it, from the 1974 Golf to Mk6-era 1.6s, at 1.3 to 2.0 litres, and the ancestor of the EA113 and through it the EA888.

It is belt-driven and it is an interference design. A snapped timing belt bends valves, which on an engine this old and this cheap is usually the end of the car rather than the engine. Belt history is the whole question on any example, and an unknown belt should be treated as due rather than probably fine.

Its characteristic noise is the hydraulic lifters, which tick on start-up when the oil is old, cold or low and quieten as pressure builds. A ticking EA827 that goes quiet in thirty seconds is behaving normally; one that does not is a lifter or an oil-supply problem rather than a valve clearance, because there is nothing to adjust.

Beyond that it is about as simple as a modern engine gets — port injection or a carburettor, two valves per cylinder, no variable timing, no direct injection and therefore none of the intake-valve carbon that dominates its descendants. A running fault here is ignition, fuel delivery or a vacuum leak, and the diagnostic path is the one that stopped working on everything built after it.