The sooty exhaust and strong smell of petrol has returned after an absence of a couple of months. As you can see from the first shot, this is the wall against which I park her, under the shelter of the porch. This is the splatter coming from it.
And here's my exhaust as of this morning. The car was washed last Tuesday (day off) and the exhaust was cleaned. My only trips have been to the office and back, no motorway work art all.
Now what is interesting is that last Tuesday I popped down to see Jason about this issue as it's been bugging me for a while. To keep this brief, here's the process he went through while I was there:
1: Took out the plug leads and discovered that the lead to plug number 3 (Looking at the engine and counting from the left) was absolutely covered in oil.
2: He took off the rocker cover and we saw one of the 4 black round seals was wonky in its housing.
3: Obviously he'd taken out the spark plugs and we saw how black they were, not oily but just covered in carbon.
4: He checked the black gasket that goes in the rocker cover, it was replaced 6 or so weeks ago and that was fine.
5: He cleaned up the rocker cover interior which was rather oily and also the top of the engine.
6: He fitted new spark plugs - Bosch genuine ones and Bob's yer uncle.
When I fired her up there were massive amounts of smoke from the exhaust but Jason said that was the oil burning off. Fair enough, after 10 minutes or so it did disappear. Anyway, I drove home and must admit the throttle felt very nice, kind of 'light' which I presumed were the plugs.
However, as you can see, this problem is now back, the smell of petrol is a bit obvious and the soot is pretty manky.
Now, in a world's first, I actually took off the spark plug cover myself this morning and had a look at the leads myself. The plug body on 3 and 4 were a little oily but not to the extent of what I saw last week. I've been to fill her with petrol just now (Shell Premium) and she feels okay but sometimes it just feels a bit sluggish when I put my foot down, not a lot, I hasten to add, but enough to furrow my brow.
Sorry this has dragged on a bit but just wanted to give you the full SP and hope someone can throw some light on it. Thanks as ever, Si.
