When I first got the JRSC, everything was perfect. Then a couple months later the car developed a heavy buzzing when the engine was lugged slightly, especially starting off from a full stop, but also if I deliberately lugged it. Then the noise disappeared and I've had two years of wonderful, trouble free driving from the car. A few weeks ago, the noise reappeared (no work had been done on the car prior to its reappearance) and it doesn't seem to want to go away now. It runs perfectly but the noise is really annoying and I can't reproduce it in the garage and haven't been able to track it down. I recorded two instances of it and posted an MP3 at:
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Any help as to it's cause would be very much appreciated.
My first thought on playing your MP3 is a piece of plastic being pushed/pulled/twisted into contact with the ends of the fan blades - How are the motor mounts?
What's the condition of the fan shroud? Any evidence of the fan making contact with it?
Don't consider either one of these "gospel", though... Weird noises can come from really weird sources. Case in point: A buddy of mine had a similarly tough-to-track noise in his Ford Courrier that started after we went out on rougher roads than we should have been. Basically buried the truck in pea-gravel. Once we got it out and started for home, there was a sound under the passenger floorboard that was nasty enough that we BOTH thought that something had broken in the front end, and stopped to crawl underneath and find out if it was even safe to drive it home. We found absolutely *NOTHING* that could account for what we were hearing (and FEELING - it felt like something smacking into the floorboard - HARD) It was bad enough that anytime it happened, I'd jump and worry that something had let go, and was about to come through the floorboards. But the little beast handled and otherwise behaved absolutely perfectly in every way, other than making that noise at seemingly random times. He only ever managed to cause it "on purpose" one time, but was never able to make it happen "on command" after that, and it never happened below 25 MPH. No amount of shaking, bouncing, or otherwise messing with it when the truck was standing still could make it happen.
Several months afterwards, he was up underneath doing something - I think he was putting in new brake pads - and found an oblong stone about the diameter of a dime, and twice as long trapped inside a coil spring between the frame rail and the floorboard. Removing the stone cured the noise permanently. Near as we were ever able to figure out, the noise resulted from a bump that mashed the spring far enough for the stone to make contact with both the frame and the floorboard - but ONLY when the stone had managed to jiggle into a "standing up" position inside the spring.
Strange guy that he was (As if *I* have room to talk about strange - but that's another story :) ) he had the stone drilled to take a ring, and used it as a keychain :)
If it's that rattley sound you're talking about, that sounds kind of like the bad catalytic converter on my '93, which started making that noise one day when I floored it and took it to the ignition cutoff in first and then second gear. Inside the metal casing is some kind of ceramic, which age and impact can fracture into gravel.
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