peanut
Active member
The S2 languished in the driveway most of last year. The very few times I needed to make a quick run into Town shes started on the button and behaved herself faultlessly, so imagine my surprise and consternation yesterday when she hard started as I was about to take her for her MOT. !
Its like the cats,.... they are in the house under your feet the whole year round but inexplicably disappear completely on the morning you need to take them to the Vets for their booster Jab.....weird?...
Anyway I managed to start the car eventually and get to the local MOT station 8 miles away . The new sill that I had recently welded on passed with flying colours, (thank god for the plastic cover trim cough). Everything was looking tickedyboo right up until the tester started the car for the emissions test .
With smoke filling the garage and the engine hunting up and down continuously from 400 – 1200rpm there was no way in the World short of bunging him £50 notes that it was going to pass.
So ( arghhh.. I so hate it when people start a sentence with ‘So’.. grrrr ) I spent most of the afternoon and evening reading up everything I could to refresh my mind on AFM , ACV, TPS, vacuum, earthing points,anything and everything that I could think of that could cause a rich mixture and a fluctuating idle .
This morning I took the tools out into the drive and worked my way through everything on my hit list including cleaning and resetting the spark plugs ,which not surprisingly were very sooty .
Having nearly exhausted all the easy things I could think of ,I was leaning on front of the car with hands spread-eagled along the badge bar surveying the engine, looking for some devine intervention, ( as you do,) when I spotted something not quite right. The hose clamp on the AFM wasn’t aligned with the AFM ....wtf????.
Closer inspection revealed that the the hose was not pushed fully home on the AFM and the clamp was spinning loosely ? wtf? . Then I remembered that the last time the car refused to start I had loosened the hose to squirt some Easy Start into the inlet and must have forgotten to retighten the clamp ...buga. So with the skies darkening and in the middle of a hailstorm, I aligned the hose and tightened the clamp. I turned the key and she started right up, the idle settling down to a steady 900rpm, a tad high perhaps but stable again.
I guess I would have found the problem when I got around to testing the vacuum but I could sure have saved myself a lot of wasted time and needless worry if I’d just remembered to finish off tightening that clamp.!
Its like the cats,.... they are in the house under your feet the whole year round but inexplicably disappear completely on the morning you need to take them to the Vets for their booster Jab.....weird?...
Anyway I managed to start the car eventually and get to the local MOT station 8 miles away . The new sill that I had recently welded on passed with flying colours, (thank god for the plastic cover trim cough). Everything was looking tickedyboo right up until the tester started the car for the emissions test .
With smoke filling the garage and the engine hunting up and down continuously from 400 – 1200rpm there was no way in the World short of bunging him £50 notes that it was going to pass.
So ( arghhh.. I so hate it when people start a sentence with ‘So’.. grrrr ) I spent most of the afternoon and evening reading up everything I could to refresh my mind on AFM , ACV, TPS, vacuum, earthing points,anything and everything that I could think of that could cause a rich mixture and a fluctuating idle .
This morning I took the tools out into the drive and worked my way through everything on my hit list including cleaning and resetting the spark plugs ,which not surprisingly were very sooty .
Having nearly exhausted all the easy things I could think of ,I was leaning on front of the car with hands spread-eagled along the badge bar surveying the engine, looking for some devine intervention, ( as you do,) when I spotted something not quite right. The hose clamp on the AFM wasn’t aligned with the AFM ....wtf????.
Closer inspection revealed that the the hose was not pushed fully home on the AFM and the clamp was spinning loosely ? wtf? . Then I remembered that the last time the car refused to start I had loosened the hose to squirt some Easy Start into the inlet and must have forgotten to retighten the clamp ...buga. So with the skies darkening and in the middle of a hailstorm, I aligned the hose and tightened the clamp. I turned the key and she started right up, the idle settling down to a steady 900rpm, a tad high perhaps but stable again.
I guess I would have found the problem when I got around to testing the vacuum but I could sure have saved myself a lot of wasted time and needless worry if I’d just remembered to finish off tightening that clamp.!
