Today while puttering around town, for some reason the engine died.

More exactly, I came up to a traffic light, and when it went green, I went to accelerate normally away, when it felt that I stalled. No biggie, I went to restart. The car came to life, but felt very strained.. I looked at the boost guage to see what was going on, and it appeared that the guage was hovering a lot closer to the 0 mark than it usually does.

When i eventually got the car parked, I tried to restart again, but all I got was the same straining as the engine struggled to run, and a lot of smoke comming from behind. It smelled very much like gas to be honest.

I had a look at the oil levels, and all appears to be well, and also checked the coolant as well. It was its normal green colour. This has me rather stumped.

One more thing too.... NO Check Engine Light......

It is as if the ecu thinks all is well, when in fact there is an issue.

I had a friend, who is also a shadetree mechanic have a quick look, but he feels that the car dropped a cylinder. I am not sure about this myself, since the engine does not violently rock from side to side as it does when you pull one of the coil pack plugs..

There is zero smoke rising from anywhere in the engine..

We are getting a compression and leak test done tomorrow, but there has been no signs of a drop in performance at all. Up until the engine quit, vacuum when at idle was at normal levels.

It almost feels as if the ecu suddenly richened the mixture up to the point that it would not run.

Any ideas guys??

Car is at Stage 4 levels, and is catless. It has been this way for 25K miles, with no other issues what so ever.

as mentioned before, oil levels are perfect, and is not chololate milky (if that makes sense), and coolant levels are perfect also, with no signs of contamination there either.

 

Could be a large vacuum/intake leak. Check all your hoses, IC etc. and listen under the hood for hissing noises.
It's also possible that the timing belt skipped some teeth on one or more pulleys. If you don't find anything else wrong, or if compression reads low in any cylinders, pull the covers and check your valve timing before tearing the engine down.

 

Thanks for the heads up...

If a cylinder fails though, would one not get a check engine light though? My friend who has a shop reckons that there wouldn't be a check engine light if there was a failure of somekind in the combustion chamber.

The odd part of all this is that the car was running PERFECTLY up until it just went dead.

As mentioned in the previous post, the engine turns over fine, but when it fires, it won't idle by iteslf. It will stay alive if i give it gas, but I end up with black smoke comming out the back of my catless exhaust... smells very much like gas...

I know what it feels like when one of the cylinders is not firing (feels like 20 people on each side of the car rocking the car sideways, and the car doesn't feel like this at all.

I will check for vacuum leaks though. I have a DR500 intercooler, and in the past, when the hose popped off the turbo, I could hear it pop off, but no check engine light.. But then, i never pushed the car either as soon as I became aware of it.

If there was some kind of catastrophic failure in the combustion chamber, how would that explain the fact that the engine turns over with no problems what so ever. No odd sounds while the engine is cranking to suggest that something is off in there...

 

You could have something like a broken ring that would cause a compression loss without preventing the engine from turning over normally.
Another thing to check for is a bad coil pack, they do sometimes fail suddenly.
I would think that a problem which essentially disables a cylinder would at least set a CEL for misfire but I also wouldn't make any assumptions just because the light isn't on. It might be helpful to monitor the ECU with a scanner or Delta Dash to see where all the operating parameters are.

 

My frend, who is also a mechanic called me this morning with the sickening news that I toasted a cylinder (#1)....

I then went to the shop to discuss what my options would be with the car, only to find that he was BSing me about losing compression in piston 1

Surfice to say, I let him have it, and gave him a piece of my mind....

The actual problem turned out to be one of the hoses on myFMIC. One of the clamps had worked its way loose, causing one of the joints to separate completely...

This was probably why there was no CEL in the first place... But it is scary though that just one hose comming loose can spell lights out for the engine though, and mean getting the car flatbedded to in order to figure that a clamp came lose somewhere.


Thanks Mulder for posting on this.. I have not slept all night, worrying about what I my next move would be if in fact the engine really was missing compression....

Good news though, was that the compression was good through all cylinders, with them all being in the mid 150psi range, and the leakdown tests were excellent.

Thanks again, and sorry for raising a false alarm of sorts....

 

That's ok, you had no way of knowing what was wrong until it got checked out.
I see I was right about it possibly being a hose.