Thanks for the reply, had a word with the owner, and the car is a 1.8T so only has two coils. It will run with one spark plug removed and resting on the engine, and run until he turns the ignition off but only at idle. If he tries to increase revs it seems to strangle the engine and dies. Idle control valve, cleaned and reset. Throttle potentiometer, substituted by known good one, no change. He’s tried removing one HT lead with all spark plugs in place but same behaviour. No test drive as he only has power at idle, and has limited the amount of time running the engine on three as he’s afraid of damaging it. The splutter: for the first few turns of the starter it appears to fire up as normal but then hesitates and dies, most of the splutter noise seems to come from the throttle housing.
I’ll do another house call with the T4 in a few days, but I’d like some idea of what I should be checking or looking for, esp. the engine management section as there appear to be lots of readings or values that might lead somewhere. We have one 1.8T owner up north who has 35 years garage experience that might be able to interpret the values provided, but is otherwise at a loss at the behaviour of the engine.
Regards
|