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Heya,
Over memorial day weekend, I decided to take my 27 year old sonett III out for a long drive.
I got home okay, after about 80 miles of driving. It's important to realize that I had intended to drive a little more, like 300 miles one way. Needless to say, the sonett III got about 40 miles from home and manifested some symptoms that suggested it wanted back to the garage, NOW!..
So, being the "I've got an old car, let's drive it hard, see what breaks, then fix it" type of guy, I was blazing along on the interstate at 70 or 75 mph when a one-lane road construction constriction caused all traffic to come to a screeching halt. My temp gauge rose about to the 2/3 point, not very close to the red, but significantly past 1/2. While I was sitting waiting for traffic to resolve itself, something happened...
Idle suddenly rise into the thousands range, then dropped to about 200. 2500-200-2500-200-2500-200. If this was a 16v 900 engine, I'd say bad air mass meter, like that. I backed the car up the on-ramp that was right behind me ( heh ) and turned around and drive home.
Revving the engine up into the 3000 range, everything is basically okay, with the exception of being a little touchy in terms of throttle response, like a lurching from on-to-off throttle.
What I am wondering is what happened? What's the deal?
I know that the car had a pretty fast cold idle before, maybe 2000+. When the engine would warm up, it would kick down to like 1000.
I wonder if the previous owner had perhaps adjusted something wildly out of spec, which was working for the engine because something was gunked up or otherwise restricted. I drove it hard and something gave, now the previously set idle settings are all wrong.
If I go start the car now, it basically revs to 4000 and stays there. No hunting, but then I haven't let the car really warm up, since it just wants to rev at 4000 rpm I'm a little leery of even running it.
This is sonett #2, and I've probably had it for a month. Was pretty decent to drive before the 'event' but it always had a sticky feeling throttle until it was run at a decent speed for a while. What I mean is that I could feel some sort of backlash with very subtle throttle movements. Kind of a quick lurching back and forth. Running say at 65 mph on the highway for 5 minutes would clear that up, and it would run smoother.
At any rate, I was considering sticking my nose in the hatch tonight, and was wondering if anyone would be able to think of some quick checks that would solve problems with symptoms matching mine, or maybe someone would be able to ask questions that I would be able to answer- leading to solutions.
thanks much, I'm off to go put a freewheel control shaft in sonett #1. Turns out that the horrible transmission problems I was having were all due to an internally cracked control shaft. Hard for me to believe that I didn't check that part out earlier.
Again, thanks
Rolf
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