05.25.18
THE SMOG TEST
Of the four cars I've owned, smog has never been an issue for me. After getting my Range Rover Classic, it has suddenly become a enormous problem. A vehicle nearing 30 years old with 173,000 miles on the engine is enough to worry about, but tack 2 years of rusting out in a parking lot onto that and you'll find yourself an anxiety-ridden mess biting your nails at odd hours of the morning, unable to sleep going over how to fix things.
I took my truck to a specialty shop on Tuesday to get a misfire diagnosed and EVAP leak fixed.
The results were not good.
Since failing smog, I inspected the spark plugs, which showed that Cylinder #1 was having some issues which I attributed to possibly being a bad spark. The ignition wires I ordered finally came in, and I hoped that fitting new ones would maybe solve the misfire I was having. By the way, if you're in the market for new ignition wires, just short of Magnecor wires I would recommend STI for being half the cost, made in the USA, and German engineered. In any case, I brought the Range Rover to Exclusive British European in Campbell to diagnose the cause of the EVAP leak and misfire. A compression test showed Cylinders #2-#8 pumping at 120-125 psi, with Cylinder #1 at a meager 45 psi, which is not only really not good, but actually really bad. The tech's first impression was that the cylinder wall was cracked, and the whole engine needed to be repaired. They quoted me at $6500 to acquire and swap in a new engine, which is pretty damn good considering a new engine block is $7000, but I pushed for them to do a leak-down test and confirm what was really going on.
Range Rover parking only? Don't mind if I do...
To be fair the techs weren't far off. If you lift off the oil fill cap, you can see smoke puff up every time Cylinder #1 hits its compression cycle. There's also a noticeable whirring sound the gets a lot louder when you pull the cap off, and both of these are signs of gasses escaping past the piston and into the engine block.
If you see smoke coming out of here, it may be a bad sign
The leak-down test pinpointed the cause of the misfire to the piston rings on Cylinder #1. The guys at Exclusive British comped this (which I really appreciate) and stayed super professional despite me being a pain-in-the-ass through the 6 or 7 phone calls we've had this last week. In any case, the piston rings are at least a ray of hope in an otherwise bleak diagnostic that would have resulted in needing a new engine. I poured some Engine Restore in, since that's supposed to bump-up the compression; I'll do a compression test this weekend to see if it can boost the readout on Cylinder #1, and weigh whether or not it'll have any effect on the smog retest. I'll have to investigate and decide whether the cylinder rings are a worthwhile effort to replace. I have friends who are way more experienced in the matter, but it would be a real pain to get down to the piston only to discover the cylinder walls are kaputt. I'm thinking a borescope might be a good idea while I've got the spark plug out for the compression test. Time will tell.
In the meantime, a shot of this beaut/brute until things develop