Hey all,
In an attempt to perform some preventative maintenance I've ended up making my car run worse. My 2009 E82 120d has just crossed 130k miles so I thought it was overdue some new glow plugs, after battling to get them out I've finally got the new ones in and all the pieces back together. But now my car runs worse than before I started this endeavour. While I had the intake off to replace the glow plugs I also cleaned the intake from the oily sutty sludge that was in there with the pressure washer. The intake has a fair amount of slop in the swirl flap rod where it meets the actuator, this is 100% a boost leak but I don't really want to perform a swirl flap delete as I don't particularly want to lose any low-end torque, but perhaps that's the lesser of two evils between that and a boost leak. During this cleaning process, I noticed the anti-shudder valve was pretty crunchy to actuate by hand, and when it came to fitting it back to the car I'm pretty sure the motor won't be moving it, so this could be contributing to my issue, but I thought this was only used on engine cut off.
When I first started the car after putting everything back together it was really hesitant to start and I had to crank it for quite a while. When it did eventually fire up it sounded awful, but I put this down to likely having some water end up in the combustion chamber from the recently cleaned intake? There was lots of (blue-ish) exhaust smoke at this point, but after a short run this has mostly cleared up and the engine runs far better than when first started. But on a cold start, the engine is really shaky, enough the vibrate the whole car, it didn't do this before I opened anything up. Under hard acceleration the exhaust releases a light smoke ploom, not rolling coal, but closer than before. Reading the engine codes, I get glow plug activation faults for cylinders 1, 2, 4 where before I had errors on 1, 3. I also have a code for Oil level, but I've just put 5.2L of 5w-30 in, and it's 3/4 of the way to the top mark on the dip-stick, fault sensor? And now sometimes I get a code for DDE smooth running controller, but this isn't currently active.
Active engine codes:
00498E - DDE: Oil-level sensor
004A3E - DDE: Glow plug, Cylinder 4, activation
004A5E - DDE: Glow plug, Cylinder 2, activation
004A6E - DDE: Glow plug, Cylinder 1, activation
Possibilities:
Faulty glow plug replay/control unit
Swirl flap actuator, now cleaned allows more boost to escape without ECU knowing causing more fuel than required being injected
Fallen carbon from cleaning clogged injector
Running an injector quantity test, cylinder 4 is an outlier at 4.3 mg/stroke with other cylinders being -1 to -1.9
1: -1.5
2: -1.9
3: 4.3
4: -1.0
What do you guys think some of my issues could be caused by?
In an attempt to perform some preventative maintenance I've ended up making my car run worse. My 2009 E82 120d has just crossed 130k miles so I thought it was overdue some new glow plugs, after battling to get them out I've finally got the new ones in and all the pieces back together. But now my car runs worse than before I started this endeavour. While I had the intake off to replace the glow plugs I also cleaned the intake from the oily sutty sludge that was in there with the pressure washer. The intake has a fair amount of slop in the swirl flap rod where it meets the actuator, this is 100% a boost leak but I don't really want to perform a swirl flap delete as I don't particularly want to lose any low-end torque, but perhaps that's the lesser of two evils between that and a boost leak. During this cleaning process, I noticed the anti-shudder valve was pretty crunchy to actuate by hand, and when it came to fitting it back to the car I'm pretty sure the motor won't be moving it, so this could be contributing to my issue, but I thought this was only used on engine cut off.
When I first started the car after putting everything back together it was really hesitant to start and I had to crank it for quite a while. When it did eventually fire up it sounded awful, but I put this down to likely having some water end up in the combustion chamber from the recently cleaned intake? There was lots of (blue-ish) exhaust smoke at this point, but after a short run this has mostly cleared up and the engine runs far better than when first started. But on a cold start, the engine is really shaky, enough the vibrate the whole car, it didn't do this before I opened anything up. Under hard acceleration the exhaust releases a light smoke ploom, not rolling coal, but closer than before. Reading the engine codes, I get glow plug activation faults for cylinders 1, 2, 4 where before I had errors on 1, 3. I also have a code for Oil level, but I've just put 5.2L of 5w-30 in, and it's 3/4 of the way to the top mark on the dip-stick, fault sensor? And now sometimes I get a code for DDE smooth running controller, but this isn't currently active.
Active engine codes:
00498E - DDE: Oil-level sensor
004A3E - DDE: Glow plug, Cylinder 4, activation
004A5E - DDE: Glow plug, Cylinder 2, activation
004A6E - DDE: Glow plug, Cylinder 1, activation
Possibilities:
Faulty glow plug replay/control unit
Swirl flap actuator, now cleaned allows more boost to escape without ECU knowing causing more fuel than required being injected
Fallen carbon from cleaning clogged injector
Running an injector quantity test, cylinder 4 is an outlier at 4.3 mg/stroke with other cylinders being -1 to -1.9
1: -1.5
2: -1.9
3: 4.3
4: -1.0
What do you guys think some of my issues could be caused by?
