Services and things.

March, march, forward MARCH!

I've been toying with the March for some time now. Have made this and that plus educated my self with it's anatomy. It is still broken, more than ever, but runs nicely. The reason was also found out, MAF, which I did not even know to own. Bloody hell that is one doomsday invention. Fails on every car :D

And how I found it out? Well... There came a day when I was kinda racing through an exit and the engine stalled. I thought it was a lack of fuel, but it obviously wasn't. Later that day, MIL came on and the running of the engine went from horrible to terrible. Within next few days the light turned off and on again, so I figured out some sensor is giving up soon. And it did... I was heading to the DSG and once again the MIL turned off and March run smoooothly :) But later that night I started the engine and it died immediately! FOOK! I managed to get it idling, barely, so I could check which sensor or coil was causing me head ache and finally found one coil to not change the idling. So I removed the plugs and checked them. Equally black, every one. Conclusion, something else is wrong and the plugs are just bad because of that.

I got it running again, but it still put black smoke, or Black ghost (like C-Rock named it) through Reinhart Titanium muffler. At this point I started to loose my temper as the clock was way too much and I needed to be somewhere else already. So I started my diagnosing again in  frustration without any good results until I remembered the bloody MAF again! I unplugged it and TADAA, the March started to run like a little angle again.

Now, after I've been running around few days without MAF and on "emergence program", I noticed that the engine is actually rather good compared to driving it with broken MAF :)

And what may have caused this? Well, there is two reasons that I can see, and both are oil-related. 1st, the engine breaths heavily making the throttle body assembly all oily, thus oiling the MAF. 2nd, I have a K&N oiled air filter, which is known to cause problems to MAFs. Personally I have hard times in believing that the K&N has caused any problems at all. It could cause, if the re-oiling after washing was done with excess amounts of that red oil, but it was not. Second reason why I do not believe that is, that I met the same problem long long ago before that K&N was even installed on the March. And when I installed it, I noticed that the OEM air filter box was full of oil.

So my conclusion is, the March have had wrong type of oils or it has not had regular oil changes at some point of it life. Both theories will lead to excessive mechanical wearing, thus the engine is not able to hold combustion pressures on top of the piston as the tolerances are not anymore what were supposed to be. After it started to leak the pressures, the oiling of the intake started, thus oiling the MAF. Once the got oiled, the ECU used more fuel than needed. Excessive amounts of fuel got into the engine oil (this can be easily smelled from the oils), thus making it too "lean" which lowers the oil pressure and oils lubricating capabilities.

More of these in the next posts in which I'll tell what I have been doing :D ... exciting ...