I have a lot of tapping coming from my Corsa 1.4 and some misfiring and would like some opinions on it. Please bare in mind I don't know a lot about the innards of cars, only what I've learnt so far, so sorry if I explain things poorly.
I know it's not a good car but it's all I've got, and it's going to be cheaper to fix it than buy a new one.
We changed the head gasket 2 days ago after it failed. It's all cleaned up and back together (new gasket etc of course
), but there's a lot of tapping when under load - it's not so noticeable when there's not much load though. This is a new thing, it didn't tap before.
There is also an occasional misfire. This was happening before the head gasket went, although it's certainly nowhere near as bad now. When the gasket went I figured that the gasket was probably causing the previous misfires, but obviously not as it's still here to a certain extent - even though the gasket's fixed.
The car has hydraulic tappets and initially they seemed to be holding the valves open causing backfires and low/no compression, but they seemed to 'bed in' after a few hours and now the car's fine.
We've done a compression test since and now there's no problems at all there. There's not really any way we can put the car under load and do a compression test? Revving it doesn't cause misfires, the car needs to be under 'real' load to misfire (e.g. fast acceleration or high-speed driving) rather than simply spinning fast on the driveway.
So... any ideas? We're fitting a new cam belt (it does seem a little loose and I doubt it has been changed for a while, certainly not during the 2.5 years and 30k miles that I've had it
So maybe a loose cam belt is causing misfires? Or is that not possible / very unlikely) and a new drive belt and alternator - the alternator's been making a tinkering sound for a while but now it sounds more like a powerball.
Oh yeah and timing - we put a strobe in and it looks fine. When it misfires though it seems a tiny bit out, but that might be one of those things that I only "see" because I'm expecting to see it.
Any opinions on what to do, regarding the tapping and misfiring? Maybe it's an electrical fault? The lambda sensor is new also. The misfiring is most important but the tapping would be nice to get rid of too.
Other than this though, when driving sub-30mph the car drives really nice other than being a bit noisy.
Thanks in advance for any ideas
I know it's not a good car but it's all I've got, and it's going to be cheaper to fix it than buy a new one.
We changed the head gasket 2 days ago after it failed. It's all cleaned up and back together (new gasket etc of course
), but there's a lot of tapping when under load - it's not so noticeable when there's not much load though. This is a new thing, it didn't tap before.There is also an occasional misfire. This was happening before the head gasket went, although it's certainly nowhere near as bad now. When the gasket went I figured that the gasket was probably causing the previous misfires, but obviously not as it's still here to a certain extent - even though the gasket's fixed.
The car has hydraulic tappets and initially they seemed to be holding the valves open causing backfires and low/no compression, but they seemed to 'bed in' after a few hours and now the car's fine.
We've done a compression test since and now there's no problems at all there. There's not really any way we can put the car under load and do a compression test? Revving it doesn't cause misfires, the car needs to be under 'real' load to misfire (e.g. fast acceleration or high-speed driving) rather than simply spinning fast on the driveway.
So... any ideas? We're fitting a new cam belt (it does seem a little loose and I doubt it has been changed for a while, certainly not during the 2.5 years and 30k miles that I've had it
So maybe a loose cam belt is causing misfires? Or is that not possible / very unlikely) and a new drive belt and alternator - the alternator's been making a tinkering sound for a while but now it sounds more like a powerball.Oh yeah and timing - we put a strobe in and it looks fine. When it misfires though it seems a tiny bit out, but that might be one of those things that I only "see" because I'm expecting to see it.
Any opinions on what to do, regarding the tapping and misfiring? Maybe it's an electrical fault? The lambda sensor is new also. The misfiring is most important but the tapping would be nice to get rid of too.
Other than this though, when driving sub-30mph the car drives really nice other than being a bit noisy.
Thanks in advance for any ideas
