fast bloke et al,

There was me trying to ask the questions in a manner that would save as much distress as possible! Good explanations you made though.

Moray

 

'Chelle

An alternative explination. If the tests Firefox suggest come up negative, consider the following;

If (and it is a big if), one of your coil packs has gone down, and if (yeah, Iknow, two in one sentence) you've driven the car since it happened, you may have suffered "bore washing" (oh,err, Madam ). This is when the fuel is going into a cylinder and the plug fails to fire it, causing the fuel to stay in there unburnt. It then washes the oil off of the bores, causing the rings to wear. The exhaust will then contain some (or lots) of oil smoke.

Unfortunatly, this is not cheap, but may be less expensive than the head gasket problems previously suggested.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings. I hope I'm wrong (and the other Guys are too), and that it is just something cheap that needs doing.

Duncan

 

I get the same 'quivering' on my 95WRX. It used to happen a fair bit until I realised it was a coil pack on one of the spark plugs that I could hear arcing (loud ticking noise). I replaced the coil pack and it seems to have mostly disappeared.

I think the quivering was mainly due to it firing on 3 cylinders instead of 4 that made it particularly noticeable although when I put the old right foot down the coil pack magically came back to life with no loss of power.

I would be suprised if your head gasket has blown as you would be getting huge amounts of white smoke billowing from the back of the car. I had a head gasket blow on my old Renault 5 Turbo, if anybody had been behind me they would not have been able to see where they were going it was that thick !!!

Unfortuntely I'm not a mechanic so take what I've said with a pinch of salt

 

Ahhhh - If only life where so simple. Michelle being Michelle needs this diagnosed without getting to a garage.

 

Michelle being where she lives has no local garages that are really competent or have the right equipment to do it.......so........is there anyone who can give me some eimplete tests to do? (litmus paper ) Or recommend someone or even please come up and see me

 

I had this on mine chelle, was running like sh17e wouldnt hardly tick over and had serious shake's. Took it down to a local scooby specialist whom said coil packs straight away, but after further inspection turned out to be idle valve and lambna sensor full of crap, just bear that in mind before spending £200 on coil packs.

 

Sounds like your car has the same symptons as my 96 Impreza. At first my car lost alot of power, got very smokey, then the engine started to run very unevenly and while ticking over the whole car would shake and there was a slight knocking noise from the engine, but would run a little better when warm.
So have now found out that I have melted a piston. This was caused by a blocked fuel filter which when I took off the car and emptied it out it was full of a very fine grit.

 

My 2c.

Smoke at first start up in the morning may be normal for boxers. Old 911's do it quite regularly. Most articles/books written about them don't seem to think much of it IF IT GOES AWAY after a few seconds and does not smoke when hot. This could be due to excessive oil accumulation on the bores overnight.

BUT if you're smoking when hot/all the time, I would suggest that a piston ring is not sealing properly, or that your piston has cracked. I have seen a WRX engine opened with a chipped piston - the car did not show any signs of impending engine failure. Couple more hundred hard KMs and he would have to be towed in.

Now, I didn't read thru the entire thread very carefully, but if your car's smoking all the time now, I would suggest you bring the car in and get the block disassembled. At this point, you may only have to replace the piston heads. If you wait till a blow, you may be looking at a new block, conrods, valves etc.

 

Oh, forgot to add. The shaking is very likely to be ignition related, and not engine mount related. When one cylinder does not fire, the whole thing goes out of balance. Get the plugs, leads, coils checked.

Smoke in exhaust is simply caused by oil getting into the compbustion chamber, burnt and expelled out thru the exhaust valves. If it were my car, I won't drive it to the mechanic (if you're within towing distance). You risk wrecking the cat (if installed), or worse it may blow on the way. New pistons are a thousand quid job for really good ones. New block and conrods etc will easily treble that figure.

 

Chelle....
Does it shake on the...

 

Corners???

 

Get back to the muppet forum J&N You naughty muppets

Thanks for all your help guys I am getting a compression test done today on it (only a 10 mile round trip) though I may leave the car at the garage if I can do so.........

So I will await the results and get back to you

Big thanks to Steve Lawson too who took some time out to speak to me on the phone thanks again

 

Samething with mine

Turned out to be a Piston and head gasket.
The piston is softer than the bore so the piston wore first not damaging the bore.

I also noticed the starting sounding different slower or slight pausing. (difficult to explain)

Easiest thing to do is compression check as you are doing.
My compression ranged on each piston from 12-14 (psi i think)

My oil was getting into the air and water system by through the breathers, inlet manifold and headgasket. Oil everywhere then as it was really bad pouring out the exhaust.

Noticed the car shaking on idle but went just as well as normal??

Hope it is not as bad as we are all thinking.......

Thanks
Scott