Technical Seicento 2010 timing gear

[jevgienij]

Okay so I recently bought a 2010 Seicento (well, it's not a Seicento anymore, it's a 600). I was moving from a 1995 Punto 1.1 which I knew all well and I was so sure that there won't be much differences, just SPI vs MPI. I was so wrong...

The first thing I was replacing was the spark plugs. I just typed "seicento 1.1 spark plugs" in the search engine and found ones desribed as fit for Seicentos 1998-2010 so I ordered them. Imagine my surprise when I unscrewed an old spark plug and found out that the ones I have got smaller thread size than the new ones. I slowly started to notice the differences. Then I went to a big local car parts store and asked for Seicento 2010 spark plugs. The shopkeeper did a quick search in his PC and wanted to sell me unfit spark plugs with bigger thread size! Yes, all the car parts catalogs say that 14mm thread spark plugs are fit for Seicentos 1998-2010. This is so confusing...

This new Seicento 1.1 engine is a mystery... Whatever I look for, the parts, the turorials, everything, they are for the old 1.1 MPI. And considering Seicento was produced for 12 years and the MPI upgrade happened in 2005, almost half of it's production time they were making the new MPI. Yet it seems to be a very rare version amongst all users.

Okay, I had to get that off my chest because everything about this car is so frustrating. My question is how do I check if the timing gear is set correctly and how do I even set it after replacing the cambelt? There's no incision on the head like it was before the upgrade so...

 

[rallycinq]

care to post some more pictures of the engine?

D

 

[blu73]

I've never seen one of these seicento badged as a 600 rather than seicento in the metal before, did we even get them in the UK??

Side note, sei's were mpi from 2001 onwards not 2005 - so in reality they were mpi for most of the production life. Never heard of a sei having different plugs to any others.. Using an eper to get part numbers rather than using websites filters might save you alot of bother by sounds of it.

But yes, please upload more engine bay pictures, see if we can work out why its different, it must have a different head to a normal mpi seicento or something.

 

[jevgienij]

What I found out so far is that approx. 2005 Fiat has made a quiet change to Seicentos to comply EURO4 norms (old MPI is EURO3 compliant). The obvious changes I noticed so far are:

- Different head, following:
- Screwable oil cap
- Different and presumably better cover gasket (mine has still an original one and after 164000mi it has just a minor leak)
- Different, smaller spark plugs (same as Bravo II)
- Different timing gear, which isn't safe anymore. In the old MPI when the belt broke, you could just put a new one and move on but in this version something might get broken when the belt brokes.
- Bigger, better water pump and better engine pistons (this one isn't confirmed by me, I read it on a local forums).

Didn't notice any changes in the intake and the throttle. Gearbox still has that window (picture attached) which was used to set the timing gear in the SPI/old MPI but it seems to be useless here.

 

[varesecrazy]

Its followed the panda in hike from 60 to 69 bhp.

 

[blu73]

wow, it really is quite different, who'd have thought it lol.

Cam sprocket clearly has a timing mark on it which is a good sign. I've not messed with any of the newer 8v engines before but the head does look like what you would see on a 8v fire 500 with some ever so slight differences. So i would look at how to time them, it'll be same just with a slightly shorter belt. I was also unaware modern 8v fires are interference engines, without looking it up i guess they have higher compression so that gap has had to go in favour of the higher compression, i'm guessing now though of course.