Hello all,
I was driving my mom's `95 Legacy L on Friday and noticed what appeared to be an engine miss. When I started the engine I could hear this very noticeable miss that was very constitent and rhymic. When leaving the engine in idle and applying the accelerator, the rate of the missing increased equal in ratio with that of the engine rpms. There doesn't seem to be hardly any speed/performance loss, however gas mileage has went WAY DOWN in the past few days. In fact I put $10 worth of gas in the car when the tank was near empty on Friday. I drove it 76 miles to pick my mom up from work and come home. The tank when filling it up was a 2-3 'dots' below half. By the time we got home, it was 2-3 dots above empty.
My initial reaction was that it was an ignition miss, but when I noticed the miss increasing in frequency in ratio to a revved up engine, I got to wondering if it was a valve going bad / tapping? I had an explorer once that blew out two valves and symptoms were rhymic 'tapping' or misses, along with major dropping in gas mileage. Although that vehicle had major performance losses due to it's weight and the engine virtually running on 5 cyclenders.
Any thoughts and ideas? I'm having her take it to the shop in the next two days to have a mechanic look at it. I"m beginning to lean towards a possible bad valve. Or am I off and it's an ignition misfire that is causing the miles per gallon drop off? As I said above, there has been maybe a hair of a performance drop off, but it still drives just fine like it has.
Brad