The engine is the 1.6HDi 8-valve 75ps and I think is the older pre-DPF version (thank heaven small mercies
)Problems
It burns oil - not a huge amount, but more than it should.
There's a lot of oil in the air intake (from the rocker cover vent through the turbo, intercooler, and throttle, and into the inlet manifold).
On starting, particularly cold, it produces a huge cloud of black smoke.
It starts a little hard from cold and runs rough for the first few seconds.
It runs a few degrees cooler than it should.
Work I've done
Suspecting some of the common and well-documented problems with this engine, in the summer I dropped the sump and gave it a good clean and cleaned the turbo oil feed out. There was no obvious clogging, and the revised design banjo bolt filter in the turbo oil feed had been fitted. I replaced the turbo core anyway as I thought I detected play in the bearings.
I replaced the injector seals and retorqued the injector clamp bolts - these didn't appear to have worked loose.
I found the EGR valve and ducting, inlet manifold and inlet ports were heavily clogged with soot (pics here). I cleaned everything out, and ran it with the EGR valve shut (unplugged) from then (June 2018) til last month (Jan 2019) when I plugged it back in to get rid of the engine warning light for the MOT (am I allowed to mention this?
).It's had three oil and filter changes since then, using decent filters and Total Quartz Ineo ECS 5W30 (ACEA C2 spec). It's probably done about 4000 miles in that time. It was suggested way back that I might be overfilling the oil (since some conventional wisdom suggests low oil capacity contributes to some of the turbo failures) but I've run it both at the maximum and minimum fill mark and there's no obvious difference.
Oil is being passed out of the rocker cover into the air intake. I understand that it's normal for some oily air to get pushed out to ventilate the crankcase, but it's definitely excessive. I've tried to seal where the pipe goes onto the rocker cover, having read that a leak here (caused by a old/worn o-ring) causes a lack of back pressure. The pressure was regularly blowing the pipe of the turbo itself, but I've since replaced the orange seal on it, and it's stayed on - however I think that's probably just pushed the problem somewhere else.
MOT
I'd given up the car really, and was expecting it to fail its MOT and then I scrap it/sell it as spares and buy another. I went and had a chat with a local garage advertised as a French car specialist, and told the guy what the problems were and what I'd done, as above. He seemed to know the engine (as you'd expect) and said I'd done everything he would have. I wanted him to try and diagnose and fix the problem, but his suggestion was that he try and MOT it first, so I took it in and let him do that. It passed, and he seemed unwilling to investigate further and repeated that I'd done everything he would do, and so I took it away. Now I'm wondering what to do next. I'm willing to spend a bit of money if I can get it sorted, if only someone will take it!
What to do next
I'm a bit stumped as to what to do next.
I'm starting to wonder whether an injector problem could be causing this. I have access to a friend's Lexia/Diagbox setup now (though no experience using it) - not sure if that could help.
Also considered replacing the rocker cover to see whether whatever PCV valve in the cover itself is venting excess oil.
The engine has always run a little cool - I think stat opening temperature is 83degrees and it runs consistently about 77. Not a huge amount and can't imagine it's causing all this trouble. On any other car, it would be a 5 minute job with a £5 part, and I would have done it months, but it's a £50 part buried down the side of the engine, and looks like the coolant needs to be drained/replaced/bled to replace it, so I haven't bothered.
A couple of old threads about these problems:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=60577
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=60245
Anyone got any bright ideas? Because I'm losing the will to live here
