My car :-(

Pete.

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The message from Pete Smith contains these words:

Fuck off, I'm stuffed.

Oh, just one

No you're not.

The message from "Stuffed" contains these words:

OK, I'm /also/ stuffed.

It's a bit hard to get that much detail in a photo, but I could try. I've got a picture of the rust though.

It was a private sale, the owner was moving to Australia. It was also a woman :-(

My dad's come up with an idea for solving my car's problem :-D. He thinks it may be the rocker box gasket. We're replacing it this weekend anyway because there is an oil leak in it. My dad thinks the misfiring noise is due to a weak mixture and suspects that the rockerbox gasket may be letting some air in. At first it didn't sound right, but there are two parts to the gasket. There's the rockerbox part and then a section for the injector. If the injector part is also leaking then it may let some air in.

Do you think this could be causing the misfire and maybe the pinking? The pinking's very different now that I changed the ignition coil. It's generally quieter, but under heavy load is much more aggressive :-(. I don't know whether that's due to changing the coil or due to moving the HT leads when I changed the coil.

Have you tried a full tank of Optimax to see what effect it has on the pinking?

Well, we don't want it to get cold now do we? Perhaps some draught excluder felt from B&Q would be better than a proper gasket, certainly you get more for your money and it'll keep all those nasty puffs of air away from the valvetrain and camshaft. Your dad may have experience in fitting that sort of things to household doors. Better ask him.

Don't worry about it, it was probably just someone from this group coming round to fix your car once and for all...

:-o the gasket was about £2.65!

I used to use Optimax every week until the petrol went up loads.

Why didn't you say earlier hat the rocker gasket was leaking? Its a well known cause of pinking. The air gets into the rockerbox and the movement of the valve return springs causes a vortex and the air goes down the valve stems. If you had said this from the start, all your troubles would be over. Hope this helps.

Thanks for that. But how about answering the point?

You're evil, do you know that? :-)

FWIW, how the hell the OP's dad thinks that air getting in around the rocker cover is causing a misfire, I have absolutely no idea.

OK, if oil was pissing all over the plugs, _maybe_.

I'm beginning to think troll. I didn't before, but this is getting silly.

Pete.

The crankcase in an engine is under slight vacuum to prevent fumes escaping into the atmosphere. The usual way is a large(er) pipe into the inlet manifold with a small(er) breather to allow in fresh air. If the rocker cover was leaking badly I suppose it could upset the mixture. Ish. Certainly removing the oil filler with the engine idling can cause some cars to stall.

The message from Pete Smith contains these words:

In all my years I've never seen one which discharged on the outside of the air filter - all the cars I've ever owned and/or worked on or even vaguely seen have been between the filter and the carb/throttle body.

I think my mums old (1st generation) Nissan Micra was arranged like this.

It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Guy King saying something like:

Avengers, Hunters, many cars from the 70s were like that; as the previous poster said, causing the early demise of the air filter.