1.4hdi amazing flatspot

[xsaras4ever]

Hello , more troubles with our 1.4hdi.

It wore the rockers to hell - one fell sideways.

We replaced rockers and lifters - head gasket too as we broke a glowplug and had to get it out.

Then it pi**ed oil from the crankshaft seal.
We fitted a new seal and after 100km is pi**ed from the vacuum pump end. New seals there and after a few hundred km it seems good.

We spoke to our neighbour - a French lad and a mechanic for the last 10 years. You can imagine that as most cars in France are either Renault , Citroen or Peugeot - that he has a lot of experience with the 1.4hdi.

He says that many many of the 1.4hdi engines pi**ed oil even from new. It stops after about 5000km.
At his garage they smother them in silicone sealant when doing head-gaskets etc.

We now have another problem.

When we first got this car and fitted a replacement engine we were amazed how lively it was for a xsara estate with only a 1.4hdi.

However after 6 months we noticed the tailgate getting black - a warning of engine wear - we were PRETENDING that we didn't see the smoke in the rearview mirror under acceleration .

Now with the new rockers its very clean.

Since replacing the rockers , head gasket, and hydraulic tappets it has an amazing flat spot between 1800 and 2300 rpm.

We are right is saying that you do not have to set a valve clearance on this engine ?????

We did a few km with the oil filler cap removed to test if it was excessive pressure in the engine - but this made no difference.

We disconnected the MAF from the air inlet pipes and were not sure if it made any difference - it might have been marginally better but not great.

Shortly after removing this we got the ANTI-POLLUTION message. We replaced the connection and the error disappeared after about 30km.

Its obviously worse in 4th and 5th gear as its more difficult to pick up speed to hit that magic number where the turbo cuts in.

When the turbo kicks-in the car is great again.

We suspect its an injector, though its a pig to do a leak-off test as the injectors are at the back under lots of gubbins - not easily accessible.

OK - big guilt here - we opened and closed an injector when we had the head off - we kept it as clean as humanely possible but maybe the spray pattern is screwed ?

Any ideas ???

[Bick]

"OK - big guilt here - we opened and closed an injector when we had the head off - we kept it as clean as humanely possible but maybe the spray pattern is screwed ?"

Any ideas ???

1) I suspect you have buggered up that injector
2) you really need to get it on a diagnostic machine

[xsaras4ever]

Ok , thanks for that.

We will do a leak-off test and fire up our very unreliable Lexia. Any pointers on what we should go looking for with the Lexia ?

[ekjdm14]

Leak off isn't that hard if it's the same as the 206 version of the engine, just remove the cosmetic cover and air filter box and the leak off connectors are readily accessible (be careful not to break the plastic nipples off when pulling at the pipework, during the recent head-off GP work on our 206 I managed to break one. The pipes themselves were still very flexible but the plastic T's are brittle and expensive to replace!)

FWIW I would suggest replacing the MAF if you noticed little difference or even slight improvement, disconnecting a healthy MAF yields a noticeable drop in performance in my experience. Since you do have a suspect injector I would suggest looking at the injector correction values in Lexia, with the engine running, to see if any are way different. Oh and I will keep a hawk eye on the cam and vac pump seals on ours now it's running again, lest it dirties the nice clean cam carrier. Cheers.

EDIT- interesting you noted severe rocker wear in your engine, I replaced the camshaft on ours while it was apart since I found some nasty pitting on one of the lobes. (the far right one next to the vac pump, the others were fine ) Is your camshaft in good shape with smooth lobes?

[xsaras4ever]

Thanks for the excellent response - very helpful.
We didn't notice a lot of cam wear - we didn't look as we had enough on our plate.

Here is the result of the injector text. These are small 33cl bottles and we ran the car on idle for 5 MINUTES.

Not a lot of diesel coming back through.

The car starts really easily and when standing it revs up and down cleanly through the rev range.
But show it a hill and it says "no way - get out and push"

Keep the revs around 2300 and it flies along.

[xsaras4ever]

Hello to all.

Replaced the MAF - fan - bloody -tastic. Car finally back to normal.

Huge thanks to all the help offered here.

Just a note - the MAF is common to the Citroen, Peugeot, Ford and Mini range.

Surprisingly, the MAF for the 1.4 Ford Fiesta was cheaper than all the others - even though it is exactly the same part number.

A very very happy camper here.

Now onto our broken van and megane !!!!