Hello - new user/96 TL owner.

I recently bought a 96 TL with 187k on it. It seemed like a great buy up front, however I have started noticing a couple of things after the fact.

My biggest concern is it intermittently seems to produce a little bit of smoke after running for a while and then coming to a stop. The temperature gauge seems to work well and the needle never gets higher than low-to-mid range on the gauge. The car doesn't seem to over heat either, as there is never smoke coming from the radiator area and it has never overflowed.

The smoke does seem to come from the back of the engine compartment, and is more noticeable after freeway time. 95% of the time I do not see any smoke at all after normal driving on surface streets.

I have also noticed that the fans don't seem to run consistently while the car is stopped and idling, however I have seen them run on a couple of occassions, once even after the car was shut off.

Any help or hints would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,
Travis

 

Do you have a CEL? It could be either the EGR pipe being loose and leaking, or the EGR valve itself.

~Cheers~

P.S. Welcome to the boards!

 

Thanks for the response. I have to apologize, I'm not quite sure what a CEL is.

Is there any other clues that might point to the EGR valve?

Also, I watched it this afternoon when I got home, and it seemed to lightly smoke for a minute or so and then the fans came on up front, but only for a short while. While they were on, the smoke seemed to subside. As they went off, the smoke came back.

I also read that the fans should kick on immediately if the car is parked and the AC is on, which they are not currently not doing.

Any thoughts?

 

CEL = Check Engine Light. Anyhow, does the smoke have a smell? I had LOTS of smoke blowing from the vents in the Audi when some leaves fell into the vents beneath the windshield. If anything, maybe some fluids spilled in the engine bay are burning up while you drive.

~Cheers~

 

Ah, gotcha. No, the check engine light is not on. It doesn't really have a smell, and it's definitely not coming from inside the engine, at least not that I can tell. The performance of the car doesn't seem to be effected either.

It sort of looks like there is a lot of built up grease, dirt etc towards the bottom of the engine on the back end and I thought maybe that could be burning off. The rest of the engine looks pretty clean given the age/miles.

I will be having the common fluids drained/refilled in the next couple of days including oil, transmission, coolant.

 

try cealing the engine compartment with some degreaser and let us know how that goes

 

Thanks for the tip, I'll let you know what happens.

 

Update with what I think is probably bad news. I was able to discover the source of the smoke. I'm not great at describing things, so I have taken some pictures that you can see at the link below. In the second two pictures, it's hard to see, but you can actually see a little bit of smoke.

http://picasaweb.google.com/travis.m...ey=f2jt1AoBcaw

Any thoughts?

 

Exhaust manifold gasket. Cheap part, bitch to replace. Worst case scenario is a cracked mani, and there's actually a higher chance of that than the gasket. If it were a bad gasket, there would be a "bidibidi" sound when the exhaust temp is still low that goes away after driving a few minutes. A new mani can be hard to source.

~Cheers~