I swear the big man upstairs must hate me. I can't believe how much has gone wrong in 7 days!

Now the problem is, my engine is running as rough as a badgers arse. I keep getting strange puffing sounds from near the throttle bodies, with an occasional puff of smoke. Does this sound like a knackered inlet gasket?

If so, do we think a generous smear of that blue sealant stuff would sort me out? I am at the end of my patience with this thing. SVA is at 8am tomorrow, and I don't have an engine that idles!

Spray wd40 around the manifold if it runs ok thats the probelem

you get that tweating sound like you heard from mine if the inlet manifold gasket is ripped, have you checked the spark plugs?

Sorry i cant help but i know exactly how you feel as last week the engine stalled and wouldnt start resulting in a new fuel pump. Then morning of the sva the clutch spring inverted itself resulting in an hour fix and then only just making SVA to fail on the brand new £110 cats emissions. Keep going.
Cheers
Adam

I was trying to set the emissions of friday, and it was running mega rich (very high HC and CO). This afternoon, I was hoping to use the wideband to bring it closer to 14.7 (it was saying ~11.5). Since all the playing, I have loaded back to the original map, that ran just fine (albeit rich).

Its not a chirriping like yours did Alex, but there is definitately something puffing like a human beatbox kinda sound (if you know what I'm on about!?). It's intermittent, and when running, does it maybe every 2s or so.

The plugs are new 2 weeks ago (although I did have problems getting them in/out - could it be a loose plug?), and the old ones, although black, still worked ok.

is the 'human beat boxing' coming from the inlets or the exhaust?

has the throttle position sensor moved??

Sounds like you are on load site 2 or higher at idle

The beat boxing is coming from the inlets not the exhaust (wrapping).

The TPS might have moved. It through up a high TPS fault the other day. But I have since readjusted the throttle pedal and reset the TPS value in the ECU. How would the TPS moving cause it to puff?

If its moved enough to make the ecu think the engine is at a higher load than it is (i.e. idle should prob be load site 0 and its on 1 or 2, each unit being something like an 8th or 16th of the total throttle travel) then it will be running the wrong fuelling and ignition at idle.

It will probably run fine at higher revs but on the tiny amount of air used at idle, a small amount of error makes a big difference to idle quality.

only way to set it really is to know the voltage from the tps that the ecu "should" be seeing at idle, and set it correctly to achieve the same.

PS justa thought, I'm used to mappable ecu's like dta and emerald etc where you can see the tps voltage on screen, but thinking about it, in your situation, you can't really have a "too low" voltage as there won't be load sites lower than zero so you could always just back the sensor off a bit (i..e move its housing the same way as the pedal moves it) and see what happens, but mark where it is now first just in case its worse.

Hope all that makes sense, sounds odd but tps position at idle is a pretty common cause of bad idle, not much movement needed to bugger things up!

[Edited on 30/3/09 by NS Dev]