Hi All,
New Mini owner - recently bought a 2009 Cooper Clubman, chili red, with about 100k miles, in excellent shape.
Was running fine and then started having a horrific rattling sound on the top end of the engine at idle and started seeing VANOS faults (287D, 283D, 288D, 296D and 2845). Cleared the faults and some come back after about 5-10 minutes of driving. I currently only have fault 2845 - VANOS, exhaust actuator movement fault.
The rattle in the cam/valve area at idle is scary bad, but revving up to 2000-3000 RPM, the engine sounds normal.

I've read about possible solenoid issues, timing slip, timing chain, etc. I did have a broken connector on one of the solenoids, and fixed that, but no change. I would prefer to start with the least invasive repair (solenoids?) and then increase if I need to. I am not sure if there are cam position sensors which also could be bad based on some of the actual values I measured. See below.

Any advice would be much appreciated!!

I recorded the live valve stream data over about 4 minutes and here's what I found while moving from idle RPM to ~3000 RPM

VANOS Adaptation, exhaust bank 1 - 50.5 steady
VANOS Adaptation, inlet bank 1 - 147.3 steady
Adaptation value, camshaft, exhaust - .75 steady
Adaptation value, camshaft, inlet - .35 to 1.3 - mostly steady around .35
Eccentric shaft, actual value - 170-171
Eccentric shaft, setpoint value - 176 steady
Camshaft position, exhaust - jumping all over between 60 and 600
Camshaft position, inlet - jumping all over between 60 and 600
VANOS exhaust spread, actual value - 120 steady
VANOS exhaust spread, setpoint - 122.4 steady
VANOS position inlet, actual value - 120 steady
VANOS position inlet, setpoint value - 122.4 steady
Valvetronic relay - open

 

If you swap the exhaust and intake VANOS solenoids, do you then get an intake VANOS code?