Waiting for a tow tried to start this morning ran for a few seconds VERY ROUGH then stalled could not get her up again did not want to burn out that shiny new starter. Paul i will come bearing cookies for man and beast lol and god bless ama towing seems to be a monthly thing with me lol I have THREE LEFT after today lol

....final result?

flooded engine and demolished spark plugs.

Neither of which are directly related to temperature and neither of which would cause the symptoms you describe other than the no-start this morning. I'm hoping Paul dug a little deeper than that...

Well for now she is running alright. We will see when we get another cold snap. what came first the chicken or the egg...just a silly question that i am sorry i did not ask Paul when I was there: would mis firing spark plugs not throw a code? its not blow by so we can scratch that out at least

oh we can dig all the way to China!!

Cylinders were completely flooded and had to be blown out.
Platinum spark plugs are brutal in winter condtions for starting
very easy to flood an engine.
We put in a V-grove plug that won't last as long but a lot more merciful
for starting.
There were no codes in the system and all the sensors were working to specs.
We put in spark plugs that work (NGK) and not the ones that say Volvo.


Thanks for the Cookies Kat,Awesome.
Oh and for triggering a Misfire Fault the answer is NO.
you never Misfired,Viv just could'nt light her fire.
there was no short to ground and she just could'nt get hot enough.

P.S do you have that name of that tow truck driver?

the balloon trick sure worked my ears are still ringing.

Lol boys with their toys. but another question - if she never mis fired and just had no spark how would that explain the lack of power on cold days? I would think that if there was no spark the car would not go?

Now she is throwing a fault code lamda came on while putting foot down to get on deer foot. i am getting a reader tonight and will pull the code and let you all know. There is nothing i can put my finger on but it just feels like she is holding back a bit.

I'm surprised by this. The computer is smart enough to know which cylinder is knocking, by virtue of the crank and cam position sensors telling the computer which cylinder just fired before the knock event. The computer should also be able to tell that the crankshaft isn't accelerating at the same rate as the others when "X" cylinder fires, given that same information. The computer gets a trigger every 6 degrees (I believe it's a 60 tooth wheel, anyway) of crank rotation and can interpolate to I don't know how many decimal places in between those triggers, so it can tell instantaneous RPM as well as average RPM, and if the insantaneous RPM drops off for a power cycle (60-70 degrees) every 2 revolutions, it's pretty noticable.

I can understand the computer relying on either a sensor short or an open circuit before triggering the misfire code, but there's a much more sophisticated way of doing it without any more trouble.

Having said that, Kat - is your car getting to operating temperature alright? I know the thermostat in the whiteblock is prone to failure and sticking open. I've read about it and experienced it first hand.

I also assume that your car runs fine in the summer, or at least when it's not cold? How warm does it have to be for the car to start running properly? I assume that you tested the sensors in the cold, Paul?

Have you tested fuel pressure? What kind of fuel are you running, and from a busy gas station or not? Has the cat failed? One of the O2 sensors failed after 330,000 km?

Well Matt, I was reminded by my dad of a time when he was cleaning out the engine bay and got a sparkie wet, and that triggered a fault.

As far as getting up to temp goes, I don't notice a problem with that.

How cold...well...when it's chinooking it's fine, when it's -20, it's angry.

Fuel pressure - I'm not sure how to test this. It is a thought though...

I tend to get my gas from the Shell in Airdrie...although before it crapped out on me this time I filled up at the Esso in Beisiker...

(but the times it was misbehaving beforehand....it was again gas in Airdrie) Gas is always the premium.

o2 sensor failing is a possibility now that the lamda is coming on...but again, if it were o2 sensor the whole time, would it not have come up as a fault a LOT sooner?

Cat failure - again, wouldn't that set off a code? And if it were cat failure, woudn't there be an audiable difference?

I'm stopping by Canadian Tire after I pick up Peach tonight (it's doggy daycare day) and finally picking up a obdII reader...(gift to self...yay I finally got one of my credit cards paid off....lol) so I will probably do a posting around 7pm tonight saying what it is.

If its that bloody baro gauge again I may just drive the car off a cliff

If it's something interesting, Paul, you can expect your lot to be graced with Miss Viv's presence again. We'll see when the code is pulled though.

Matt - I'm curious now though. What are the symptoms when the thermostat sticks open?

There's a front O2 sensor and a rear O2 sensor - the rear one is only there to verify the operation of the cat. I'm not sure how rich it would have to run in order for the rear O2 sensor to read rich, and there is a limit to how much fuel can be added or subtracted by the computer (based on information from the front O2 sensor) before a code will be tripped. That's what I'm guessing has happened: either your front O2 sensor has failed and the computer is doing it's best to adjust, or your engine is squirting too much or too little fuel and the computer is having a hard time compensating. The second thing would also account for poor starting.

Have you run a tank of injector cleaner lately?

When the thermostat fails open, the engine just about never gets up to operating temperature, and the heater never throws out good heat. When the thermostat fails closed, the engine sprays it's coolant all over the place.

I've had a fuel pressure regulator fail on me in such a way that it started and ran fine so long as I didn't go into boost, but once I went into boost the fuel pressure went crazy and it would choke out. Replacing the regulator without doing anything else solved the problem - ran no differently off boost, cold or hot, but actually ran under boost. I have NO idea why this should happen, but it did. Kat, you'd need the proper gauges to check.

Hmm, so all I'll be able to do from home is pull whatever code is coming up.

dang.

I've never run injector cleaner or antifreeze or any of those other additives....

The wierd thing is, the poor starting only happened THE ONCE.

Every other time it's started up fine...it just don't go!

I think miss viv is just getting long in the tooth and alot of her original components are on their way out.

In other words, let her go and buy that sexy ass c70 with 1/3 the mileage.

Athal - 1. I want a wagon.
2. I don't have 7k right now.
3. see #2
4. Peach and her gear (kennel) would NOT fit in a coupe. End of story.

The lambda light coming on during accel. Is it flashing and then going away? Usually a misfire will do that and will do a damage to catylitic converter code.

I also remember an article in the paper a while ago about the sulfer content of gasoline by different companies. Shell had the lowest and wouldn't you know it Esso had the highest of the major companies, just something to keep in the back of your mind.