As some of you may know I just bought my second EG Si. (No, I don't have two; this is just the second one that I have owned.) Anyway I picked it up on Saturday in Montgomery, AL and trailored it behind my Expedition to my mother-in-law's house for some final testing before I drove it all the way to Dallas.

Good thing I did.

When I test drove it, the car had a slight miss under load. I thought "no big deal, sounds like a foul-ed-out plug or something simple." Well when I was test driving it Saturday I took it out on the Interstate. Above 2500 the car was golden and pulled like a unmodded 1.6 should. Later though more problems came to the surface. I noticed the tach was slow to follow the engine speed and it wasn't entirely accurate as far as what it was registering, "No big deal" I thought.

Well, on the return trip things went sour.

The engine started running like a diesel running on a 50/50 water/diesel mix and I couldn't get the car above 60 mph. Then I started smelling the "awful" smell. You know that smell, the smell of metal WAY hotter than it should be. I immediately pulled over to the side of the Interstate and investigated the source of the smell. It was pitch black out with the exception of a passing car and then I noticed the glow. The glow was coming from under my car. It was the exhaust. I immediately started the car and let itr idle to let some cooler air in from the idling engine, and after it cooled down to a dull orange I putt-putted back to my mother-in-laws. You can imagine the explitives that flowed from my mouth during the slow cruise back to my mother-in-laws.

The next morning I pulled the plugs and looked at them to see if any were foul-ed out. They all looked like they had a little wear but no black plugs that would indicate a bad plug or injector. I then pulled the distributor cap. In all my years dealing with cars I've never seen a Distributor Cap look so bad. The closest thing I can describe the contacts resembling would be an old battery terminal that had been corroded, burnt and then dropped into the firey pit of hell. No wonder why my exhaust was the color of an August sunset, all the fuel was being burnt in the exhaust and not in the engine.

I replaced the distributor, plugs and wires, after that it ran like a ****. Even better after I took the intake resonator off. It even fixed the Tach issue of it not correctly following the engine RPM. There was no visible damage to the exhaust and I was able to drive it on to Dallas without any issues.

Stay tuned for my next post: "Spongy Brake Pedal"

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