Idle/smoke/fuel issues with a 92 plymouth reliant

You're obviously running way too rich. But first of all, the last Reliant made was in 1989. Is yours an 82? The year is important because that determines whether it's fuel injection or carb.

If it's fuel injection (85 or later) it sounds like a stuck injector. A cheap first try at a fix is a bottle of good quality injector cleaner in the gas, and take it out for a drive on the highway. If that doesn't do it, then I'd suggest getting the computer analysed for codes before starting to replace expensive parts. You can find instructions for accessing codes on the Net, but you may need a pro to track down the real problem(s).

The 2.6 was that awful "It's-A-Shitty" 4, wasn't it? I remember the

2.2 as a tough little mill that had a few eccentricities, but anything from Mitsu generally seems to suck.

I don't know if this is widespread, but from what I've seen out on the road, "It's-A-Shitty" (Mitsubishi) seems to have trouble designing and building reliable power. Many's the time I've seen a Mitsu pickup, Montero or Gallant tooling down the road with thick trails of oil mist coming out of the tailpipe. Also I've seen catastrophic failures, like clouds of steam belching from back. Not long ago, I saw a Gallant scatter its crankshaft right through the oil pan in the middle of an intersection, an interesting failure to see, to say the least.

My dad has one of the "box" Monteros for a short while...one of the worst cars he ever owned. At 32K miles, #3 piston collapsed. After that fiasco, at 37K, he started losing oil pressure and getting main bearing noise, so he dumped it. He's not as big a fanatic about routine maintenance as I, but pretty close, being an ex-Air Force maintenance officer in the '40s, so this thing had clean oil and fresh coolant on time. After dumping that turkey, he said to me, "How in the hell did they build all those damned planes in the war? Maybe we weren't shooting them down...they were falling on their own!"

It seems that Daimler was quite right in dumping its Mitsubishi holdings, which were the crown jewel of Lee Iacocca's grandiose plan to form "Global Motors" along with Daimler-Benz in the '80s. Daimler moved Iacocca out, did pretty much what he wanted to do originally, found Mitsubishi to be a loser and dumped it.

...kicking you to the curb.

Kill file list:

snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com snipped-for-privacy@epix.net snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com

....and a couple of others of which he's probably forgotten the passwords. Most of his other Google troll accounts have already been shut down.