Not BX chat dual mass flywheels

[rutter123]

Dual mass flywheels, what's the point?
I have just spent the last few days changing the DMF on the Relay Van, one of the springs or dampers had broke inside causing a rattling vibration and juddering on the uptake, we have spent many years managing quite nicely with solid flywheels as on my last Transit van, so why change to these very expensive short lived pieces of s**t ??

Answers on a postcard..........

And yes I did change the clutch as well whilst it was all out.

[rutter123]

And I have just gone through the service history of the above and have found it had a DMF replaced @ 73,000 miles in Nov 2011, so the service life is just about 70k's being as its now on 145k, that's pretty poor, and so am I now.

[Kitch]

They're there to soften the interface between foot and road. They also dampen out a lot of the vibration from diesel engines and act as a harmonic damper, to an extent. That's modern diesels for ya! Everyone thinks 'Oooh they're so good! They've got the same power as petrols now, only with a bazillion lbft of torque and they can do 84mpg and they cost £2 a year to tax!'
Reality is all the shit needed to take a fundamentally less power, more basic technology than petrol and produce the results they have in recent years, is likely to all wear out or fail at some point. DMFs, injectors, DPFs, high-pressure pumps etc. It's all fine when it works...

Plenty of petrols use DMFs these days too, but because they don't shake themselves to bits, the flywheels tend to last forever.

I do own a modern(ish) diesel, with all the aforementioned stuff, but it cost me about £200, and if any of it breaks I'll just chuck the car in a skip!