Technical serious problems today, realy need some help, white smoke, bad idle, the lot

[mzhussein]

OK, today i decided to check and clean my earth points, to sort a niggling problem i had. got carried away and ended up cleaning spark plugs as well. did this with wire wool...
ran the car for 15 Min's after on idle and was fine.
got in 10 Min's later tried to drive down the road, then there was a loud metal on metal sound....regular in sync with engine speed.
got home, and opened bonnet, checked timing and it was 180 degrees out :O , fixed that then problems got REALLY bad, i deduced that it was running on 2 cylinders, (1 & 2), sparks were going to 3 and 4 but they were 'doing' nothing, IE when i disconnected HT's made no difference. swapped sparks around and problem stayed with cylinders. then my dad sat in the car and revved the nuts off it, seemed to get better. then all of a sudden it started pouring white smoke out of exhaust....checked coolant, all gone... Worth noting that before today it showed NO signs of head gasket faliure....as i changed it about 10 months ago, been fine ever since.
one of my neighbours suggested it could be a valve problem...could it be that a bit of wire wool got stuck in a spark plug and then got pulled into the engine and this has caused a mess??
I'm relay just looking for general suggestions, ie what to do next.
thanks

 

[Mdeko]

Well it sounds as though the head gasket is knackered. Might be worth ripping the head off and looking for any damage and going from there really. If there's damage getting a new head/entire engine from breakers and fitting that.

 

[pk090]

well white smoke and no coolant would seem to me that its burning water so as said above take head off check piston heads and valves (as when buring water and stuff this causes added compression pressure which can do damage hopefuly not) if all seems good new head gasket, drain and re top up and then bleed cooling system then try again.

 

[VII CKS]

Mostly signs of headgasket failure as people have already stated here

 

[mzhussein]

i know the head gasket is gone, thanks guys none the less. heads coming off today, will take pictures. what im more worried about is the loud metalic slound that preceeded the faliure, and what caused the faliure....

 

[mzhussein]

Cracked it open, took some pics, put it loosely back together, aside from metled gasket ( :O ) anyhitng else i should be worried about??

here are some pics of what it did (i ran and got camera, in that time smoke had settled, was orginally a massive plume)




Some pics of head, block and gasket

 

[midget4hire]

mine went on my last punto

it also took with it one of the valves. The valve cracked due to overheating and ended up in one of the thing where the piston goes up and down (im having a n00b moment)

luckily the valves arent expensive and didnt do any damage

It could be that though

 

[mzhussein]

nooooo, luckily my valves are sound, cleaned em, and inspected them. all good

 

[pk090]

ok ok now this helps!
if we look at what the pictures tell us..
picture 1+2: this looks to me like burning water (water usually white smoke oil is blue or black)
picture 3: look at the cylinder on the far left hand side...the colour of the liquid inside that..does not look healthy at all and by looking at the pictre of the head and valves we can see that the ones on the left are clean and on the right are covered in a layer of soot..this could probably be done with a little clean with try and get some of the crap off.
the gasket looks as though it is wet (differant colour) on the bottom left hand side so this is where i think your problem is.

hope this helps pm or write on my wall if you need anything else

 

[mzhussein]

you can discount the crap in the far left cylinder, this was my dad spilling some coolant which mixed with the sooty deposits. so the problem is in cylinders 3 and 4
which tallys with what i found with running tests before i removed the head. which tallys with the missing bit in the gasket...what puzzles me is that it didnt overheat at all. so im at a loss as to what caused it??

 

[pk090]

you can discount the crap in the far left cylinder, this was my dad spilling some coolant which mixed with the sooty deposits. so the problem is in cylinders 3 and 4
which tallys with what i found with running tests before i removed the head. which tallys with the missing bit in the gasket...what puzzles me is that it didnt overheat at all. so im at a loss as to what caused it??

well how long was the car runnning before noticing the smoke? has it been sitting a while or daily use?

 

[mzhussein]

was my daily runner! the smoke only came yesterday at about 4, when 2 cylinders died.

 

[pk090]

hmmm this is quite puzzeling to be honnest..

 

[mzhussein]

i know...hopefully itll just disappear when i change gasket...