Worry about missing pieces from broken cam tensioner pad?

[dmillrod]

2000 A6 Avant 250K. As you may have seen in my recent thread, I removed the cams in order to replace the half moon only to discover that the bottom tensioner pad was completely missing and the chain was grooving into the metal. Bought and installed new pads. Telling the next part even though it's embarrassing - put everything back together, including valve cover gaskets and valve cover. Then woke up in the middle of the night realizing that I never went looking in the head for the missing tensioner pad. Really didn't want to do over everything, but then had images of a piece jamming the cams and all hell breaking lose. Hadn't put the timing belt on yet. So since I couldn't fall back to sleep anyway, took everything apart and found a chunk wedged into the bottom of the chain. Looked around the area under where the chain goes and found a few more small pieces. Felt everywhere else I could access in the top of the head and didn't find any other pieces. Glad I didn't give into wanting to go back to sleep and roll the dice.

So my question is, do I do anything else to try to retrieve the remaining 2/3rds or so of the demolished pad? No way of knowing how many miles they've been in there for. Feeling lucky they didn't destroy the engine so far.

[rollerton]

Most of those pieces are now in the oil pan and trying to get sucked into the oil pickup tube. By the time they make it through the random machinery inside the engine and get down to the oil pan the pieces are fairly small, but not small enough to go through the screen in the pickup tube. If there's enough pieces and sludge and other junk it can potentially start to block the oil pickup tube. So, kind of up to you if you feel like pulling the oil pan to clean it out. At 250k miles?...it wouldn't hurt.

On the other hand ...is it likely to be the cause of any major damage? Not super likely, but possible. If you fished everything you could out of the crevices under the valve covers then you can finish THAT project and decide if you want to tackle the oil pan.