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Well, all the thrashing was bound to do something sooner or later, and my current trend for changing up at about 2500rpm and keeping the pedal pasted all the same cant have helped....

Anyhoo. It's been getting the winter flu, the little H-reg 1043 injection, hard to start, drained the old battery once or twice, running a bit rough. But today... Pull out of a junction.... go from first to second... a bit of a jolt and a kind of sharp, sudden, LOUD half-clunk, half-ping noise that sounds kind of volkswagen-y but DEFINATELY not usual. Stop and check that, yes, its still runs, nothing seems to have fallen off, steering, gears, front and rear brakes ok, and carry on. Only the one ping noise, nothing more.

But, having got to work (a few hours and many miles later the same day), there's a funny burning smell coming from somewhere, and it seems to be bonnet originating.... and later, a slight whiff of the go-juice when getting back in the hot seat. Cant see anything immediately wrong under the bonnet, except there's... maybe, just maybe... a fair bit more oil on the engine cover and coated around than usual. I don't keep a running tally of spillage/dirt and all, but it looks well soaked, and the engine tone seems a bit different while rolling home all relaxed. Plus it started QUICKLY first time without any complaint - at 3.30am in january, not a single skip, no 30 second period of running on 3 pots.. and THATS just wrong compared to the last 4 weeks!
(had a suspicion sitting in the seat i'd done my new speaker wires wrong, but once outside, nope...)

Unless it was the gears... synchro on second is pretty much non existant now, doing it's job perhaps 1 in 4 times, giving a crunch on 2 of the others and a straight (still crunchy) refusal on the 4th if not DDC'd. Although the gear action seemed no different before and after, it did happen during a change into 2nd, so maybe a now-useless something's sprioinged off at last.

Anyone know what that mystery noise might be, and the source of my engine's oily coating/the smell(s) (it's too much to just be drips, but i cant see anything squirting out anywhere.. it may be leaky petrol?)

I was planning on booking a (premature for this year) service and all-round check up next week too, as it will hit 70,000 pretty much spot on at the right time. Typical if something went wrong before i could get it done, and have it blamed on lacking service schedule.

Hopefully it was a random noise from the exhaust and some misplaced road water (from... where?)... can only pray.

Erm... , maybe I pulled something the other day too. Because for the first time ever this morning the car turned on first time and I got all the way to work without stallin the little hunny. I was a took back by it really, cos eer since the winter kicked in it ALWAYS stalls down my road, or on my drive. Weird...

maybe for its new years resolution its deceided not to give you any grief

hehe i should be so lucky...

well, i've changed the air filter (a doddle) and the oil & filter (arrrrrrgggghhh everything went wrong, it took about 5 hours instead of 0.5, and i've used up a box of daz covering the dark patch on the road)... and it's running... a fair bit better. Still not great though, not like it was a couple thou ago, so there's something else needs doing. It passed 70000 miles yesterday and is starting to sound like "an old car" rather than just "a noisy little car". Maybe I need to do the plugs as well, or scrub off the leads and wait for a really dry day to hit them with the WD40 and sealant compound. Or that thing with scrubbing out the dizzy. In any case, it's now starting and idling fine, but dont you dare touch that throttle til it's been sitting 30 seconds or so.... day-um... its misfire city, especially if you have grand ideas such as reaching 40mph in less than a minute after releasing the handbrake.

So.... just the plugs?
Wouldnt be so bad if 1. it wasnt winter and therefore its hard to determine whether it's just the weather, 2. it hadnt been serviced in august already (by the local National store, those robbing b*stards)

Plus with a bit of playing around when it was on the jacks, and a lot of calculator fooling, i also came up with a revised estimation on the gear ratios again which i feel to be a whole lot closer, but i'm still holding out hope of someone with a tach (and a 1L / 1.3 Spi) or who has done a rolling road session being able to fill me in closer. Looks like 4th is even lower again than i previously hoped/thought. I also figured out that my GB problems were actually badly adjusted clutch problems, in the way that the wheels actually still seemed to be affected by the engine and stick position even with the pedal all the way down...

get it booked in pronto

Well i was away all last week and i come back to find a reply to this topic, so i guess it's only civil to say... i think i fixed it

The real test will be the next week or so in the UK - really cold temperatures possibly followed up by horrible wetness.

Going up to bangor start of last week prompted me to have a proper look into it - took 10 sec or so to get started after I'd loaded all my stuff in, and it took all the way to the motorway (4 or 5 miles) to actually start running on a "full" 3.5 cylinders at full throttle (oddly it went ok at half throttle). Stopped to put optimax in just in case, no such luck. The wet seemed to affect it a little for the whole trip (it was raining gently), didnt get past 80mph without help from gradients.
Morning after I arrived, that became 30 seconds and about 3 or 4 attempts. Ker-ker-ker-ker-ker-ker-ksplutter-chuga-chug. Having nothing really to do til the afternoon (the starting was merely to test)... i said... to hell with this... i'm going McGuyver

After much starting, peeking, poking, putting on and off of the ignition cables (my main suspicion), there seemed to be a sparking short circuit or something on one of the HT lines, dizzy side (distinct clicking noise apparent in place of stroke when that lead off). Marked the cables and the distributor orientation, then off with the cap for a good old inspection.

Ew, full of wet clag and dirt and carbon and stuff. Must have been shorting and conducting like nobodies business, surprised I got a working spark on the 2.5 cylinders that were dependable. The other 1.5 (one totally missing, the other intermittent) must have been losing voltage to the point where fuel wouldn't ignite when supplied past a certain richness - hence cold problems and full throttle at low speeds but not high. Took it in mates kitchen, rinsed out, wiped out hard with kitchen roll and had a go at scratching some carbon off the contacts. Finally another squirt of WD40 and wipe-out, replace, reconnect wires... Ker-ker-kervroom... vroom, vroom

Doesn't seem to be having anywhere near as much trouble now - still a little funny, but i suppose the spark plugs, valves, cat, whatever are a little sore. It was absolutely tipping down when I came back but the car was a little darling. Still, I only got 43mpg, without exceeding 70mph at any point of the journey and mostly doing 55 because of the visibility, so.. hum. Back home, I've got some fairly rough sandpaper out, cut some short thin strips out and had a better go at the contacts and rotor arm, removing all the dust. So now I'll see this week whether it was just fixed by other means while i was messing with the dizzy cap (coincidence, placebo etc) or if that's actually the disturbingly simple solution to this annoying problem.

(( of course, it doesn't help that when I bought it, the metal cover that Haynes shows me is supposed to protect the plastic dizzy cap was missing, and it hasnt had one since ))

It could still be dodgy spark plugs, a vacuum leak at the throttle body (eh?) or a few other things however, so... anyone else with these problems... give your cap a checkout and maybe a clean up... but dont come crying to me if it doesnt help