ticking noise, Pinto, but NOT a worn camshaft

[alfas]

i recently pruchased a pinto powered car (2L, 205 Sierra Engine), fitted with twin weber dcoe´s.

the car arrived with worn camshaft and worn followers and was ticking quite loud. camshaft was original ford, so nothing uprated.

new standard camshaft, new followers, oilspraybar is clean and distributes a nice amount of oil to each camlobe, new oil---now the camdrive is smooth and quiet again.

but: there s still a ticking noise comming from inlet side, front of the block / area fuelpump.

with rev´s higer than idle it disappears, once the rev´s fall down near idle, it starts again ticking....its not a knocking sound from a crank or big end bearing failure. and its not from the exhaust side, like an blown exhaust manifold gasket.

any ideas?

[rallyrob]

Little ends maybe?

[alfas]

little ends do a bright ticking noise?
are the little ends a common failure on a pinto?

what concerns me, the noise is comming from the front-left side.

taking into consideration that the camshaft rotates half the speed than the crank, the ticking noise from the frequency could be crank related.
whats about the auxilary shaft?

[Graham]

small end failure would be extremely rare, especially given the press fit pins, it could be a worn pin or piston, removing plug leads with the engine running would show that up as the noise would stop when you pulled the lead of the effected cylinder. ive never heard one make a noise, but the aux shaft and its retainer can wear and allow the shaft to move back and forth.

does the breather box have and intact pcv valve? if it does and its connected to the inlet manifold it will make a ticking noise at tick over.

[alfas]

as it has twin webers the breather is not routed into the vacuum of the manifold. its just a hose from the breather box (without pcv valve) hanging down to the environment (catchtank will sort this out soon)

the noise is present with and without cambelt-cover...just to exclude also this area.

aux. shaft has no lateral play....at least not when i check on its cambelt sprocket.

fact is the 3rd cylinder is a bit down in compression (8 bar vs 10bar on all the others) and goes up whith oil sprayed into the bores, so the engine is smoking a bit....the noise is comming from the front left corner of the enigne.....whereas the 3rd cylinder is far away from that area...

[rallyrob]

ive never heard one make a noise, but the aux shaft and its retainer can wear and allow the shaft to move back and forth.

If that's the case then the next thing that might happen is the drive gear on the aux shaft that drives the distributor could have damage occuring to it. Obviously this could then start to affect the ignition timing and the hex drive for the oil pump.



I know someone that's had exactly that happen in the last few weeks with a Pinto in a Capri, it chewed the drive gear up on the aux drive shaft.

[rallyrob]

Oop's never meant to do that.

[Graham]

aux. shaft has no lateral play....at least not when i check on its cambelt sprocket.

..

distributor oil pump drive will limit movement as that ends up taking up the endfloat

[alfas]

ignition timing is stable. its a bosch elecronic dizzy. no play from dizzy shaft, besides the centrifugal advance. car starts on the button, very smooth and stable idling.

so i think for further investigations the engine needs to get opened...or driven until it fails completely....

[Miniliteman]

As a test advance the ignitiontiming a few degrees and check if the ticking is still there.

[alfas]

wisdom of life: "if you cannot solve a problem, get rid of the problem" --> car now sold-on...without any loss

[Forest_rallying]

wisdom of life: "if you cannot solve a problem, get rid of the problem" --> car now sold-on...without any loss

That's a bit extreme, it's only a Pinto engine, problems with them are never that difficult to solve. We had a Ford Kuga 2.0 TDCI which kept instantly going into limp mode, many different specialists looked at it and couldn't solve the problem so that did have to moved on with the problem never solved.

[Miniliteman]

wisdom of life: "if you cannot solve a problem, get rid of the problem" --> car now sold-on...without any loss

You give up easily !

[alfas]

sounds like...but i had certain reasons why i bought the car....plus a very tight budget for that project..at the end of the day it was rational to get rid of that car quickly, concentrate on the next project, before throwing money and time for nothing.

[Forest_rallying]

As Ian Dury once sang What a Waste.