i got this car for free being a non starter, So i tried pulling it in gear and it would not start. Got the car in the garden connecteed up a fully charged battery and started pulling things of to see if it makes any diffrence. I took the top of the carb of(bit that runs to the air filter and the head???) and turned it over and it started!!! But it is spitting so much fuel out of the carb and if you give it a little rev it back fires though the carb and loads of smoke comes out of the carb! and just dies. Just fuel going every where big puffs.

Is it somthing simple?

The car is a Fiat brava 1.4sx

The car cost me £20 and it has only done 38k been sitting for 3 years the owner died.

Please help!

backfiring through the intake (forefiring) could mean the valve timing is out, but sitting for 3 years would not affect the timing, but then again we dont know if it was working ok 3 years ago. first thing to do is a compression test.

yea it was running the the person owned it just died it has only done 10miles before its last mot.

would the spark plugs make this happen. If the timing is not out what else would make this problem?

sparkplugs can sit for many years with no problems, but fuel will become far less flammable so i would change it.

drain the tank & fuel rail, refill with new petrol, let the pump pressurise the system and then get it running for as long as possible to see if it improves.


there could be hundreds of possible faults for these symptoms, but you need to remember the cause, it has sat for a long time unused, this narrows down the possibilities a lot, and proves that things such as sparkplugs are very unlikely to be a problem.

it is also likely that the electrics will be suffering from damp if the car has sat outside, this usually happens after a couple of weeks so after 3 years i would be surprised if it did not have electrical problems, such as damp connectors on several sensors. a dry warm garage is the best way to cure this.

If it is spitting fuel out through the carb have you checked the fuel presure regulator.

If I remember right its triangular shaped. I will have a look on the Fiat disk later.

It can cause the engine to overfuel because it may be letting to much fuel through to the injector and the excess is sparying out. It might have been removed and not refitted correctly.

When you refit the regulator tighten the 3 bolts one turn at a time. i.e. Turn the left hand bolt once or even half a turn, then the right hand bolt, then the bottom bolt. Becuase if ti is not centralised it will start pissing fuel out as soon as the engine is Started.

fiat_-_bravo said:

If it is spitting fuel out through the carb have you checked the fuel presure regulator.

Click to expand...

this engine is overfueling and spitting back because he removed the top of the throttle case, which i assume means some vacuum hoses will have been removed.

I had to change the idle stepper motor on myn start of last winter. For some reason just went into a daze and was convinced i was removing the stepper motor but I was removing the fuel regulator . (They are no where near each other). We al drop the occasional bollok, so shut up

Any way refittied it started engine, and fuel was pissing out, thats when I worked out it had to be centralised.

Centered it all up still with the top cover off, started engine and no fuel pissed out.

Finally got the fiddly bastard stepper motor changed though.