peejay

While sitting in line at the BK drive-thru getting my traditional pre-race gut bombs (2 S-E-C croissan'wiches and a coffee) by car started idling... weird. Still ran smoothly under power, but instead of doing the normal brappy 1800rpm cold idle, it was idling at only 1400 and it sounded... different. Like every other brap was missing. It sounded kinda like how a chainsaw idles! Just sorta purring and the every-other-brap. But it ran just fine when not cruising. Hmm. It had a normal warm idle after 1/4 mile of highway driving.

I don't think it was fouled plugs because the plugs are new, and I know all too well what fouled plugs feels like. I hope I don't have a cracked seal... I don't see why I would, I trat the car right, lots of low-intensity highway cruising with plenty of high revving, blow-the-carbon out driving on the weekends. All the same, when I pick up my new fuel filter, I'll get some nasty carb cleaner and fog the snot out of the engine at the track, maybe the seals in one of the rotors got a little sticky? (The old plugs I just changed were black and sooty... yecch)

Well, we'll see if I need a tow home from the track today...

Montrealer

My car seems to do that too, but only when its cold outside, it seems to idle kinda crappy but then when the engine heats up everyting is back to normal. I blame the cold weather.

peejay

Well....

At the track the engine would NOT start hot. Took forever. When I pulled into a gas station after racing, the engine died when I let out the clutch coasting in, and it took about 5 minutes to re-start. And when it did start, it ran on one rotor for a little while. Would not idle either, it's just drop down below 400 and quit.


Uh-oh.

It seems to drive okay, though, nice and smooth. Drove it 40 miles home, and it seemed to idle okay at the stoplights (after the 40mi highway drive). Started up on the first crank in the riveway after I got home.

But still... this does not bode well.

Max7

have you checked the plug WIRES? I had a bad one, and it would run on 1 rotor on startup, then run fine

peejay

I'll look into it... (using carbon-core wires is a no-no with an MSD, but I do it anyway... )

The thing that gets me is that, to start it, I have to do an "unflood" start - throttle wide open, keep cranking until it fires, keep cranking some more until it will run under its own power, and rev and rev and rev it until the plugs clear out. And then it won't idle until you drive it a while.

Uh-oh.

I still have 140mi to drive tonite, too. Uh-oh.

But it makes good power on the highway... then again my '87 will run glass-smooth over 3k despite having a blown apex seal. I'm thining it could be something as simple/stupid as a carb gasket leak flooding the engine, or maybe I flattened an apex seal spring at some point, which makes for hard starting but it'll still run OK (gas pressure provides more sealing force than the spring does once running). I'll do a compression check tomorrow.

Something else I forgot to check... the car has been slowly sucking coolant, maybe it's to the point where it is starting to affect driveability? Another thing to check....