I drive a pd170 2.0 tdi. I've had it two years now and about a half a year ago (ish) it started running like ****- rough on idle and white smoke. Anyway, I took it to Jabba sport, they plugged it in- no faults came up. He was about to give up as he had no idea what the problem could be when he just thought to smoke test the inlet manifold due to there being lots of soot on the engine bay near the cam cover. Turned out my inlet manifold (plastic) was cracked. I bought the alloy conversion kit from darkside fitted it and rough idle went away, but smoke from exhaust remained. This smoke absolutely stinks of unburnt diesel and stings your eyes like mad. After speaking to lots of people on forums etc they said it sounds like it could be cam timing out; so I ordered a vag com (this still has not arrived) checked my oil and coolant , both of which never dropped- in fact in two years I hadn't had to top my coolant up once as it was always near to max- until today...
Well. Today, I was driving home from probably driving about 10 miles and my coolant light came on in my car- this shocked me. When I got home I looked under my bonnet and my coolant was way below minimum, this shocked me majorly as I only checked my levels on Tuesday as my car was in for a MOT and I wanted everything to be fine before I took it in.
I know this amount of coolant loss is bad and I know very little about cars. I didn't want to drive my car due to not knowing what the fault is, but my boyfriend has a little more car knowledge than me (and a bigger driveway) so I wanted to get it to his so I could leave it there to check over... so I put some more coolant in, filled it about 3mm below max line. His house is about a mile away from mine- a 5/10 minute drive. When I got to his, I checked my coolant again and it had dropped to just above the min line in that space of time/ distance.
I have checked my dipstick / oil filler cap and there is no milkyness there at all.
Now I'm worrying if what I thought was my cam timing out all this time was something worse or if that is completely un related.
I just need some advice of what it could be/ what to check before having to take it to a garage to be looked at - if it's something simple like a pipe then I would rather be able to do it myself (we'll get my boyfriend to)
Any advice at all would be very much appreciated as I know very little about cars and this is the last thing that I need right on top of Christmas
![[:@]](/forums/styles/seatcupra/oldforumsmileys/furious.gif "Furious [:@]")
Well. Today, I was driving home from probably driving about 10 miles and my coolant light came on in my car- this shocked me. When I got home I looked under my bonnet and my coolant was way below minimum, this shocked me majorly as I only checked my levels on Tuesday as my car was in for a MOT and I wanted everything to be fine before I took it in.
I know this amount of coolant loss is bad and I know very little about cars. I didn't want to drive my car due to not knowing what the fault is, but my boyfriend has a little more car knowledge than me (and a bigger driveway) so I wanted to get it to his so I could leave it there to check over... so I put some more coolant in, filled it about 3mm below max line. His house is about a mile away from mine- a 5/10 minute drive. When I got to his, I checked my coolant again and it had dropped to just above the min line in that space of time/ distance.
I have checked my dipstick / oil filler cap and there is no milkyness there at all.
Now I'm worrying if what I thought was my cam timing out all this time was something worse or if that is completely un related.
I just need some advice of what it could be/ what to check before having to take it to a garage to be looked at - if it's something simple like a pipe then I would rather be able to do it myself (we'll get my boyfriend to)
Any advice at all would be very much appreciated as I know very little about cars and this is the last thing that I need right on top of Christmas
