Stanky's Car Fixing Thread - New Battery Day 25/10

[Zelandeth]

My approach would be:

Soak in Plusgas or similar for as many days as possible beforehand and use an impact driver to remove them - the impact part there is critical as it really does help break things loose.  Heaving on it with a whacking great breaker bar is far more likely to shear things off.

If it doesn't pretty much immediately wind out, get heat involved.

[Stanky]

6 minutes ago, Zelandeth said:

My approach would be:

Soak in Plusgas or similar for as many days as possible beforehand and use an impact driver to remove them - the impact part there is critical as it really does help break things loose.  Heaving on it with a whacking great breaker bar is far more likely to shear things off.

If it doesn't pretty much immediately wind out, get heat involved.

Thanks, I can do all of those things - I'll start getting plusgas on the bolts right away.

[Stanky]

The auto electrician came today and within an hour we’d gone through and found the issue - a bad ground from the igniter/coils to the rocker cover.

I say ‘we’ because I actually managed to help! With the ignition on and the electrician in the footwell I heard a clicking noise which I initially though was a relay, on closer inspection though it was coming from the igniter and on even closer inspection is seemed to be the earth strap. I removed it and cleaned it up with sandpaper before attaching it to the rocker cover directly instead of via a crusty-looking bracket, the electrician then said ‘the ABS and oil light have gone out’ so he tried the ignition and it burst into life.

What a relief!

I built the intake back up, secured the battery, fitted the radiator and fan, the coolant pipes and refilled the rad with coolant. Next up I need to refit the front bumper, wire in the fog lights, fit the front wheels and then take it down off the lift and for a run to see if it works ok.

Moral of the story is ‘always check your grounds’!

[Stanky]

Right, kids to bed and got outside and put the rest of it back together. Bumper back on, fogs wired in, wheels fitted - then took it for a tentative first run.

The clutch now bites about an inch off the floor (rather than 3mm from the top of the travel) and engages nicely with no judder. The brakes were a bit scratchy to begin with but cleaned up fine - it was just some very light surface rust from having not turned for about 6 weeks. Driving along there was a scuffing noise which I think was the disc touching the backplate, when I got back I bent the backing plate backwards a bit to make it clear the discs better.

The secondhand driveshaft functions perfectly, with no clicking or other untoward noises so thats a big success overall.

I plan to enjoy the Sirion for a bit, before booking it in for the exhaust manifold and rear beam bushes replacement jobs - I can't do the bushes myself, and if its going to the garage for them then they might as well snap all the exhaust bolts off do that job too. I'd like to get out and use it a bit more before the winter hits and the council start salting the roads.

[Stanky]

Y'know how I really ought to get the rear beam bushes and exhaust manifold sorted? Yeah?

Well, I just sent an entirely* legitimate Malaysian business seller with a letter&[email protected] email address £130 via paypal for a rear anti roll bar kit. Reputedly, he will supply an invoice and tracking number henceforth...

I would like to point out that I did do a business transaction, so Paypal will definitely* be on my side when it turns out nothing gets delivered, or its a bent wire coat hanger.

[mitsisigma01]

I'm strange, can you send some to me as well please 😬

Good luck with your purchase 🤞

[Stanky]

Fingers crossed indeed! Its through a real business, but the contact email seems a bit iffy. However, they have stock of the ARB I want and are £130 delivered. The only UK seller I could contact have no stock, have openly said its likely to be 6 months before they do have stock delivered as its a 'special order' item and want £180 NOW for the privilege of maybe getting one next year.

We'll see what arrives, if anything. 

[Stanky]

What an age we live in eh? I ordered the rear ARB from a seller in Malaysia on 1st October, and it arrived here, beautifully packaged on the 7th October for under £120. The best any UK based sellers could do was £180 and a 6 month (!) wait.

Top marks to yulicoauto.com.my for superb service and impeccable English - they couldn’t have done more to help! If you google them, don't forget the ".my" on the end, otherwise you get a VERY different (and VERY NSFW) website 

Kit comprises the ARB itself, an Ultra Racing AR16-406 bar, 2 mounting brackets and a pack of stainless steel washers and bolts for fitting to the rear beam of my Sirion. This is the 16mm version - they also do a 19mm one - which I hope will tidy up some of the body roll when driving enthusiastically.

Its also a:

 

Work was quiet this morning so I went out and got the Sirion up on the lift to fit the ARB. The rear beam is 4 pre-drilled holes for mounting the ARB so first of all I bolted the angle brackets to the rear beam. The kit comes with 8x 14mm bolts in 8.8 stainless steel, plus washers for mounting.

I did the vertical bolts up tight, then bolted one side of the ARB horizontally into to the bracket. It needs to be fitted under tension, it comes shaped like \___/ and needs to be tensioned so it looks like this |____| instead.  I got my ratchet strap out to try and bend it into position, then (in a rare instance of this for me) had a brainwave.

Rather than doing one side up tight, then using a ratchet strap to bend the other side in parallel, I undid the horizontal bolts on the side I’d done up so they were engaged about 5 threads each into the captive nuts of the bracket. This allowed the whole ARB to slide over about 1" and meant I could use a small g-clamp on the other side to bend it in a small amount, just enough to get the bolts to line up and engage with the threads in the captive nuts - I hardly had to put any tension on it to get it to this stage, meaning less chance of it slipping and pinging off into my face or whatever.

Once I had all 4 bolts engaged with the captive nuts I could tighten it all up, working diagonally about 5 turns at a time, left front, right rear, right front, left rear and so on until it was fully tightened up

Here it is in situ, I didn’t realise until I took this pic that I’d mounted it with the Ultra Racing logo upside down (doh!) but I’m not going to undo it and flip it over, no-one will see it anyway, unless I’m upside-down in a ditch!

I’ll take it for another run over the weekend to see how its altered the handling, looking forward to reporting back. I reckon with the word 'ultra' in the name its got to add at least 20bhp, right?

[Stanky]

Some progress, some regress.

With the rear ARB on, the handling is massively improved, with less understeer under acceleration and sharper turn-in. However...

The brackets that hold the ARB in place sit slightly further back from the trailing edges of the rear beam. See

As you can see from the tell-tale shiny bit, with the wheels on the ground there is very little clearance between the square end of the bracket and the exhaust pipe. Going over bumps causes the two to whack into each other as the suspension compresses and makes a nasty clonky noise. Left long enough the bracket will punch a hole through the mild steel pipe. This is sub-optimal. I've tried removing the ARB and flipping the brackets around, but then the ARB fouls on the rear beam and I can't get the holes to line up properly so the ARB has to stay where it is.

Which means the exhaust will want modifying a bit. The only issue is the final bend - leftmost in this pic

The messy black bit is where it contacts the ARB bracket so this needs to be altered and I'd like some advice. As you can see, there are three rings marked in green pen - A, B and C

What needs to happen is the final bend, leftmost in the above pic needs to be made more aggressive in my opinion. My current idea is to cut the exhaust at points A and C, and have a bit of pipe made up thats sort of like this

with swaged and slotted ends - This could then slot over the points at A and C and be clamped in place and exhaust pasted to fill any gaps. Questions are really

1. is this likely to work? Are 90 degree bends in exhausts overly restrictive? Assuming its mandrel bent I can't see an issue with it? As an example, at the front end, the exhaust goes 90 degrees from the bottom of the catifold into the central section of exhaust.

            1a. I could make this myself from 2x 90 degree swaged elbows off the shelf potentially

2. Is there a better way? Is anywhere likely to be able to modify my existing exhaust section to tighten the angle of the bend?

3. Should I fuck it off and make a simple side-exist exhaust instead with some flanged 1.75" pipe and a 60 swaged degree elbow?

4. How shit are 'Polylock' exhaust tubes?

The distance from A to C is 30cm with a vertical measurement of 19cm

Option 4 would be to cut back to point B and put in a 45 degree bend, then a straight pipe, then a pair of either 45 or 90 degree bends to joint back up at C?

[tooSavvy]

You jammy tw@@t..... I did 'my chop job' on my back, with a half hacksaw 'padsaw' thingie 😵

Two 90° bends likely be 'invisible' to gas flow 👍

[320touring]

Not to ask a daft question but can you not just remove material from the bracket/bolts?

[Stanky]

26 minutes ago, 320touring said:

Not to ask a daft question but can you not just remove material from the bracket/bolts?

Potentially, but it's all under quite a bit of tension even 'static' so I'm keen to avoid potentially weakening the brackets unless absolutely necessary

[mintwth]

How far into where the exhaust pipe is can the bracket go? 

If it's not that far, would it be easier to just heat the pipe and hit it with a hammer modify it until you've made enough of a concave clearance gap in the relevant area?

[Stanky]

Some percussive maintenance has been deployed and it's better, only contacting over the biggest potholes now.

Ive ordered another sirion rear exhaust section for £20 and sent to my brother to cut and weld to improve the clearance on that specific section, it's cheaper than a bunch of angle sections and clamps.

[Stanky]

Minor update but the Daewoo astonished us by passing another MOT today - the list of advisories was slightly longer but the tester said he was just covering his arse on most of it. Could do with some new front tyres as there is some wear on the outer edges, but since it only does a bit over 2000 miles between tests he said they'd probably be fine for another year or two.

[Stanky]

in an astonishing turn of events, all of the exhaust manifold bolts came off without snapping and having removed the front bumper and radiator support bar I was able to ease the old manifold out. It was definitely toast,, the mating face had just crumbled below exhaust ports for cylinders 3 & 4

So this is destined for the bin, possibly being sold for the metals inside - though it seems to lack any form of part number.

Anyway, gasket and new bolts on order for both the manifold > cylinderhead and manifold > centre section of exhaust, I could recycle the old ones but for a modest price I got a set with everything I needed in it. With the manifold and gasket removed, I cleaned up the mating face of the cylinderhead

How forensically clean does this need to be? after taking this pic I cleaned it up more with a wire brush, stanley blade and a fine sanding block, does the entire flat metal surface need to be cleaned back to bright metal?

I need to do two things, firstly remove the rather stuck lambda sensor from the replacement manifold, this has been left soaking in some plusgas and I'll try heating it up a bit over the weekend to free it off; then once its free I can take the manifold to an engineering shop to skim the mating face which is a bit untidy but nowhere near as bad as the old one. I'll also vacuum off the front of the block while its all apart. Possibly tonight.

[Stanky]

The last parts I needed arrived today so I set about reassembling everything. With the front bumper and radiator support bar removed it was quite an easy job. I had cleaned up the mating face of the cylinderhead with an aluminium oxide sanding block so it was smooth, located the new gasket on the two studs on the bottom edges, below cylinders 1 & 4 and then turned my attention to the manifold.

I’d taken it to my local engineering shop and they had cleaned up the mating face on their belt sander, I asked about having it skimmed, but they were concerned that the material wasn’t very thick, and also that it would be hard to clamp into position without making up a jig so I tidied it up and this was what it looked like

There were some dips around the pipes, but I hope that the gasket would sort them out. Next I tidied up the threads of the two captive nuts with a tap and some light oil, one was Ok but the other was a bit crusty.

I would the new spring bolts into place to make sure they fitted correctly. All good here. Next I fitted the new conical crush gasket which was a right old carry-on. I had to nip around the edges to get it to fit over the tail end of the manifold, then tap it into position with a small hammer. its quite a lot bigger than the old (crushed) crush gasket, which would come back to cause problems later.

With this done, I could wiggle the new manifold into position and loosely fit the nuts and bolts holding it to the cylinderhead. I used new nuts & bolts from Toyota for this to be on the safe side.

I refitted the lambda sensor connector then started to fight with fitting the centre section of exhaust to the manifold. As the crush gasket was uncrushed, this was a right old war, the gasket was too big, so I couldn’t get the threads of the spring bolts to engage with the threads of the captive nuts in the manifold. I eventually managed to use a small g-clamp to pull the flanges together enough to get the threads to engage and tightened them up, though I’m not happy with the right hand side one and will likely remove and refit it tomorrow with a washer to make it pull in straighter. Maybe it’ll crush down better when its been heated up a bit?

I started the car up to see if it leaked and was pleased to hear it less noisy with no visible or smell-able combustion gasses at the engine end. I couldn’t let it run very long as I was in the garage with the doors closed but initial impressions are good.

I also took the opportunity to top up the gearbox oil. I’d put about 2 litres into the box when we’d refitted the driveshafts a few weeks back, but it wasn’t full to the fill point so I syringed in about another 250ml until it began flowing back out, taking it up to the ~2.3 litres it should have.

I’ll take it for a run tomorrow to see how it behaves and if the smell of exhaust has gone when stopped in traffic.

[doobietoo]

Hard to see in the photos but could you not cut at points A and C  and reverse the pipe so A goes to C and vice versa? It looks like the curves are different...

[Stanky]

11 hours ago, doobietoo said:

Hard to see in the photos but could you not cut at points A and C  and reverse the pipe so A goes to C and vice versa? It looks like the curves are different...

Ah sorry yes, that is exactly what my brother is in the process of doing with a new exhaust pipe section currently. It should be done and fitted after Christmas which is when I'll next see him

[Stanky]

I wonder if the AS hivemind might be able to help me with a new malady afflicting the Daewoo. 

In the last few weeks both my wife and I have noticed occasional stutter/misfire under gentle acceleration. The first time this happened to me I was driving along a 40mph bit of road and had the headlights on, wipers on and radio on. I quickly turned off the radio, heater blower and wipers and the car returned to normal behaviour. Its since done the same thing even without much electrical load on the system, and seemed to be getting worse. Additionally, the automatic gearbox was getting even dozier than usual, often not kicking down, or flicking between 3rd and 4th (4 speed box) several times at a set speed. 

I scanned for fault codes and there was nothing present. CEL is not on, and hasn't come on.

I have replaced the battery because the old one was wrong, underspec and old. The spark plugs were new 18 months ago, and its covered about 3000 miles in that time. On removing #1 plug, the end was pale grey/brown colour and gapped correctly to 1.1mm. There is no oil or other contaminants down any of the plug wells. The ATF was changed 3 times with ~100 mile intervals between (to get about 90% fresh ATF) in 2019, its done about 4000 miles since that, faultlessly. Since then it has not lost any ATF, the level is fine.

Its had an oil & filter change by me to the correct level within the last 2 weeks. Same oil I always use.

I took it for a long run last night, about 60 miles round the south downs to give it lots of work through all gears. Its a mix of 30mph villages up to 60mph a-roads with stops and starts throughout. To begin with it behaved fine, but then the stuttering became evident after I tried to accelerate up to 60mph after a 3-4 mile stretch of 40mph. It stuttered and the gearbox wouldn't kick down until I gave the accelerator pedal a good push, it then kicked down and revved fine. It did this a few times until about 2/3rds of the way around the drive, when it started behaving fine.

By this point, I was down to about 1/8th of a tank so stopped and put 3 gallons of super unleaded into the tank to take the gauge to a bit under half a tank. I also unplugged the dashcam from the cigar lighter socket, though can't see that this could have possibly been related.

The car then drove perfectly the remaining 20 miles back home. 

Based on the above, can anyone suggest what might be the issue? My thoughts are that either the car doesn't like E10, it was brimmed with the stuff when fuel-geddon kicked off a few weeks ago and does few miles. My drive last night used up the last dregs of the full tank I slopped in when it was kicking off. Its run OK since putting fresh, premium into the tank (though not very far as yet). Was it a bad batch of fuel, or full of all the crap from the bottom of the petrol station filling tanks?

Should I look at replacing the fuel filter? Last done possibly 7 years ago? I've not changed one before but the part is cheap and probably easy-ish to access?

Should I drive it some more and see how it behaves? Should I drive it into the sea late at night and claim it was stolen and joyridden?

Normally fuckery like this would see me bin the fucker, but following the MOT last month I stuck £200 of tyres on it and I'm damned if I'm not going to get some enjoyment from them.

 

[dean36014]

When we were collecting my partners bx GTi from France she inadvertently topped the fuel tank up with E10. The difference was instantly noticeable. Car would tickover fine, but missed/stuttered at anything below 3k revs. After topping up twice with super unleaded normal service was resumed .

[Jim Bell]

This is gonna sound stupid but have you checked the plugs man?

 

[Stanky]

23 minutes ago, Jim Bell said:

This is gonna sound stupid but have you checked the plugs man?

 

Thanks, yes checked them visually and I have a brand new set to go in over the weekend. All plugs gapped correctly to 1.1mm and light grey-brown ends. They're only about 18 months/2500 miles old and have been perfect since fitting. 

[Jim Bell]

Told you it was gonna sound stupid.  

[Stanky]

I'm putting it down to either a bad batch of fuel, or it really doesn't like E10.

I put 3 gallons of super in the tank on Thursday, topped it off with 2 more from a different petrol station last night and today I threw caution to the wind and used it to drive 160 miles to buy a longboard for my daughter. This involved 120 miles of motorways and dual carriageways and about 40 miles of Wiltshire's finest B roads.

The car behaved impeccably, idle was smoother, no stuttering or misfires, it accelerated normally, even from 60mph overtaking trucks on the A34.

I've instructed the wife that if she ever fills it up, only use premium unleaded. Yes its £1.60 a litre round here, but thats cheaper than a new engine or a new car.

I might change the fuel filter as a matter of course because I know its old, and potentially full of crud.

[Stanky]

As it was dry and not freezing on saturday I lifted the Daewoo up and replaced the fuel filter. This went mostly smoothly, except for breaking the clip that secures the rearmost pipe to the filter itself as I tried to remove it. The new filter did not have clips included.

The clip is horseshoe shaped, and from some googling is GM part number 96434270 - looking like this:

It snapped along the curved bit, so I now have 2 'legs' detached from one another. To keep it all intact, I poked the 2 separate legs back into the hole in the end of the plastic pipe connector but would ideally like to secure it properly with a new clip. I rang Vauxhall and quoted the part number and they said they could get it for me and that someone would ring me back. They haven't, yet....

Anyway, my question is are these vehicle-specific, or is it a generic part? I imagine its the former and I do need that specific GM bit, but thought I'd ask anyway. 

I can't use a jubilee clip or snap ring thing because the connector is on a rigid rightangle connector. This clip fits after the flanged section of the filter meaning the filter can't pop off the connector with it fitted.

 

[Stanky]

A few minor updates. I managed to get (but not yet fit) the new clip for the Daewoo. My local Vauxhall dealer were useless, having called them up and provided the part number, helpfully listed by GM as a 'Clip' for no defined purpose, they said they could order it in, and someone would call me back to arrange payment. 10 days later I am still awaiting the phone call.

Anyway, I managed to find one for sale on Ebay - for FIVE FLIPPING QUID no less, but the part I needed. I bought it and it landed here two days ago. Shove it up your arse Vauxhall, you deserve to go bust.

I need to get the Daewoo on the lift to get at it, so potentially tomorrow. Its a case of using needle-nose pliers to pull out the half-a-clip I jammed back in, and then pushing the replacement into position. I won't bother to give war & peace on it.

What is slightly* more exciting* is that ever since the clutch swap (and engine removal...) on the Daihatsu, its run very cold. Leave it to idle on the drive and it gets up to temp, the fan cuts in etc etc, but on a run, especially on the motorway, the coolant temp drops to barely off 'zero' on the gauge. even thrashing it round some backroads only got it to about 1/4, and putting the heaters on - considering its now December, not unreasonable - makes it hit the stop, and produces less warmth than a chronic asthmatic's breathalyser test. 

I had ordered a new thermostat, reasoning that the most likely issue was that it had dried out during the engine removal procedure and had jammed open. However, a chance reading of a topic on a Daihatsu specific forum lead to a rather predictable conclusion, that I was a dolt.

The rad on the sirion has two pipes to/from the cylinderhead. Lets call them 'in' and 'out'. IN should go to the bottom rad hose, OUT should go to the top one, which has a t-piece about 1/3 of the way along which branches off to the heater matrix stubs & throttle body heated bit stubs. Being an idiot, when we had refitted the engine, in my haste/idiocy I had fitted them the wrong way around,  so all the heat was being lost through the ancilliary systems and the coolant was all rotating backwards.

I went out this evening and corrected this issue, swapping them over, being splattered with bittrex-laced old coolant and then topping it back up. with the last of my Prestone universal coolant. I'd chugged half a bottle of red wine (and spatters of bittrex) by this point so haven't taken it for a run to check my handiwork, but am optimistic that the thermostat is actually fine, but I'd plumbed it all in wrong. This being the case, it should now get up to temp correctly and stay there.

Anyway, hopefully with that resolved, its just a case of having the rear beam axle bushes replaced by a garage and driving it a  bit on dry days over the winter.

[Stanky]

On 12/11/2021 at 09:46, Stanky said:

I wonder if the AS hivemind might be able to help me with a new malady afflicting the Daewoo. 

In the last few weeks both my wife and I have noticed occasional stutter/misfire under gentle acceleration. The first time this happened to me I was driving along a 40mph bit of road and had the headlights on, wipers on and radio on. I quickly turned off the radio, heater blower and wipers and the car returned to normal behaviour. Its since done the same thing even without much electrical load on the system, and seemed to be getting worse. Additionally, the automatic gearbox was getting even dozier than usual, often not kicking down, or flicking between 3rd and 4th (4 speed box) several times at a set speed. 

I scanned for fault codes and there was nothing present. CEL is not on, and hasn't come on.

I have replaced the battery because the old one was wrong, underspec and old. The spark plugs were new 18 months ago, and its covered about 3000 miles in that time. On removing #1 plug, the end was pale grey/brown colour and gapped correctly to 1.1mm. There is no oil or other contaminants down any of the plug wells. The ATF was changed 3 times with ~100 mile intervals between (to get about 90% fresh ATF) in 2019, its done about 4000 miles since that, faultlessly. Since then it has not lost any ATF, the level is fine.

Its had an oil & filter change by me to the correct level within the last 2 weeks. Same oil I always use.

I took it for a long run last night, about 60 miles round the south downs to give it lots of work through all gears. Its a mix of 30mph villages up to 60mph a-roads with stops and starts throughout. To begin with it behaved fine, but then the stuttering became evident after I tried to accelerate up to 60mph after a 3-4 mile stretch of 40mph. It stuttered and the gearbox wouldn't kick down until I gave the accelerator pedal a good push, it then kicked down and revved fine. It did this a few times until about 2/3rds of the way around the drive, when it started behaving fine.

By this point, I was down to about 1/8th of a tank so stopped and put 3 gallons of super unleaded into the tank to take the gauge to a bit under half a tank. I also unplugged the dashcam from the cigar lighter socket, though can't see that this could have possibly been related.

The car then drove perfectly the remaining 20 miles back home. 

Based on the above, can anyone suggest what might be the issue? My thoughts are that either the car doesn't like E10, it was brimmed with the stuff when fuel-geddon kicked off a few weeks ago and does few miles. My drive last night used up the last dregs of the full tank I slopped in when it was kicking off. Its run OK since putting fresh, premium into the tank (though not very far as yet). Was it a bad batch of fuel, or full of all the crap from the bottom of the petrol station filling tanks?

Should I look at replacing the fuel filter? Last done possibly 7 years ago? I've not changed one before but the part is cheap and probably easy-ish to access?

Should I drive it some more and see how it behaves? Should I drive it into the sea late at night and claim it was stolen and joyridden?

Normally fuckery like this would see me bin the fucker, but following the MOT last month I stuck £200 of tyres on it and I'm damned if I'm not going to get some enjoyment from them.

 

Today this got worse. Like, LOTS worse.

It now bucks and misfires like a bastard under load, especially uphill. revving it does not help, it stutters and misfires really badly. It threw the EML on and after reading the fault codes it came back with P0300 - Multiple misfire (geee, thanks... Insightful...) which on googling generally seems to be both severe and vague. A wonderful combination. Today was the first time its been so bad as to trigger the EML - it's been getting steadily worse over the last 3 months though.

Since this began to manifest I have changed the fuel filter to a brand new one, checked - but not replaced - the spark plugs. Its been run only on super unleaded which initially helped but is now worse than ever. It was serviced with new oil, filter and air filter within the last 500 miles. Oil level is fine, ATF level is fine. It got a new battery too as the old one was a bit weak. charging voltage is fine at 14.7v or so.

No sign of oil in water/water in oil. Gets up to temp and stays there. 

The car only has very basic diagnostic capabilities, and I'm not getting any specific cylinder at fault. The misfiring is not consistent enough for me to pull plugs off while running to isolate it.

I have a pack of 4 new plugs that I'll fit this weekend, is it worth getting coil pack and leads too? AFAIK these are original and 15 years old. No codes related to these specifically an I'm reticent to start playing parts darts with it. Can anyone suggest anything that might help isolate the issues? I have a good delphi ds150e scanner here, the issue is that the car seems to only have a few sensors so I'm not getting much back from it.

 

Some further Googling uncovered this: https://toyota-club.net/files/faq/lacetti_eng.htm

"But the most important, the most significant and most expensive problem of these engines - valves. It begins as the misfires at cold engine and appearance the nightmare of all the owners - P0300 error. In rare happy cases, the cause is in the ignition system, but for most it means a standard disease - the valve covered with soot deposits are no longer normally closed. It can be as a deposits on a working facet of valve head, and deposits on the valve stem, preventing it to move in the guide. The consequences of this failure are clear - misfiring, power loss, overheat of catalyst because of unburned fuel.
The defect occurs massively and irregularly, in a variety of operating conditions, at low and high mileage, several times... Rubbish about "poor fuel quality" - is just a cheap trick to escape from the warranty obligations - hundreds models of other brands use the same gasoline and do not even know the term "hanging valves", but for GM brands this problem is notorious since early 2000. However, Daewoo in 2005-2007 released several updated versions of the intake and exhaust valves, valve guides, authorize warranty repair, but the final solution to the problem did not happen. So owner must be ready at any time spend at least $250 for work and $250-300 for spare parts to cylinder head overhaul."

Ummm, that sounds an awful lot like 'Desination FUCKED' to me?

 

[grogee]

Put the new plugs in, they can look ok but not be ok. Then try leads then coil. I agree it's parts darts but these are the cheap bits. Shop around for leads, I bet other GM stuff fits. 

The diagnostic code doesn't help at all, does it? I wonder if it "knows" an ignition misfire but can't detect a fuelling misfire?

[lisbon_road]

Do you have a compression tester Stanky?  I have one here you could borrow.