Quote:
Originally Posted by MRCA1ST
. . . yeah, my MAF housing was in a million pieces and there is a good chance some of them ended up in the engine.
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Story time, if you'll pardon me. Before my BRZ, I had a Mazda Protege ES: nifty little sedan with a five-speed and a 2.0 16-valve DOHC 4-banger. I loved it for 225k miles, as it handled remarkably similar to our twins. Some folks called it the 4-door Miata . . .
Well, an engine issue cropped up which made me laugh until it happened to me: apparently something like a bracket inside the cylinder head was attached with rivets instead of screws and over time they loosened, fell out and were sucked right into the combustion chambers. It was one at a time with maybe a couple thousand miles in between events, but the engine would suddenly go rough, and twice the rivets killed the engine dead like somebody jammed a tire pump in your spokes.
The dealer wanted north of $1000 for a new cylinder head (in my opinion, it should have been done for free, even if the warranty was expired, as this was a factory defect, after all), the urgent implication being that the rivet would get caught in a valve that was closing, thereby doing large damage. Since nothing like that had ever happened to my engine, I said no thank you. What did happen each time a rivet went wandering was that before it disintegrated it would hit the spark plug and close the gap. I think all told I pulled three or four plugs, regapped as necessary, and voila, perfect performance restored. The syndrome eventually petered out as the engine got tired of eating itself alive, and we lived happily ever after . . .
I hope y'all found some amusement in a tale of automotive perversity.
