Engine misfire on cold startup

SteveW

Hi all, long time no speak! Hope you're all well.

Can't believe I've owned my old SRi now for over seven years! And generally it's been pretty good, apart from a timing chain jumping a couple of teeth a few years back and general wear and tear items it's been as good as gold. Oh and a cracked head when I changed the plugs last year, nearly forgot about that! But that was fixed with a bottle of K-Seal 🙂

So, I guess it was just a matter of time before I had problems really lol.

Here's the story - I've started to get a misfire on cold startup which is getting progressively worse now. I'm now at the point where I really don't know where to start as I do have a few other problems with the car and they all seem to have come at a time when I have no spare money whatsoever (typical eh?).

The car burns a LOT of oil (around a litre a fortnight!) and does seem to us a very small amount of coolant, I have to top up the coolant reservoir from minimum to maximum every few months, so it's not a massive loss of water/coolant. The exhaust is blowing at the flexi pipe too.

I am guessing it's the rings or valve stem seals that are causing the oil use as I do see a fair bit of smoke when I boot it.

I can live with the oil loss to a point, but certainly can't put up with this misfire.

As said, it only happens when the car is cold, and lasts for a few minutes at most. Some days it doesn't misfire at all, but it is becoming more often than not. I've not checked anything yet, but just wanted some ideas really.

Plugs were changed just over a year ago and I've been too scared to change them again in case the head cracks again lol, but I guess I'm going to have to bite the bullet and do it. I do have the EML on at the mo with an EGR fault, but have a blanking plate in place so the EGR valve itself isn't "in" the engine so to speak, although it's still connected, so I need to get a cheater to clear that fault.

So any ideas what I should look at? Coil pack? Plugs? Replace blowing exhaust I guess?

Any help greatly appreciated, and if I remember anything else that may help I'll add to this thread.

Sorry for waffling, just trying to give as much info as poss really 🙂

SteveW

Thought I'd update this to let you know what I've found this weekend in case anyone reads this in the future.....

Changed the Coolant Temp sensor first as it's the easiest thing to change. Made no difference. So while I was waiting for the engine to cool down again, I fitted my freshly delivered EGR cheater and finally got rid of the nasty EGR valve - so now I have no EML any more! YAY! 🙂

Once engine was cool I set about changing the plugs as they hadn't been changed for about 16 months and as soon as I had removed the coil pack it was pretty obvious what the problem was. Plug 4 was completely submerged in water, the hole was completely full up! The contact on the coil pack was rusty and the rubber thingy was very "squelchy" when I squeezed it.

I soaked up as much of the water as I could before removing and replacing the spark plug (and the other three). All the plugs actually looked OK, nothing particularly dodgy about them at all.

Cleaned the contact on the coil pack with contact cleaner and a wire brush and swapped the squelchy rubber bit for a dry one that I had in a box of spares (kept from an old coil pack from years ago "just in case" lol).

So, I put it all back together, shoved some more "K-Seal" into the coolant top up and took the car for a gentle drive until it warmed up. No misfire at all. And I think that the water has stopped leaking again now (for the time being) as I waited 24 hours and removed the coil pack again and the plug hole is still dry.

I have no idea how long it had been getting wet like that, but I'll be keeping an eye on it now and checking it every week or so for a while to see if it gets any worse or whether K-Seal has once more put off a massive spend on a new head......