Ok i just got my 84 SE running.

First off it idles at around 1500k rpm. smokes only a little bit that is barely seen.

When i give it some gas it lets out alot of grey smoke.

On one occasion the smoke had a brownish orange tint to it during about a 3-4k revs.

Car has racing beat race header
2g leading coil
MSD Blaster 2 for trailing
& walbro 255 pump

Wondering what the cause may be. If its running too rich or maybe only running on trailing or leading or what. I know its not oil or water as there is no water in at the moment. only running for short periods.

Will be checking spark plugs here in a minute as soon as engine cool.

Any help would be appreciated. I'm very scared about my car.

 

Just got done checking my plugs.

Leading and trailing were slightly black and dry.
Confirmed spark on leading and trailing.

Cleaned them up and she started up real quick.
Compression is still good.

Problem still persists however.

 

Don't run your motor without any coolant in it. It would take only a moment to do detrimental damage. Which, in fact, probably explains what is happening...

What does the smoke smell like? Oil, or fuel?









.

 

Sounds like oil to me. Does your dipstick look foamy? Does the car run smoothly while this is happening? If you were rich enough to be blowing visible fuel out the back, it would not be running right. Or if you ignition timing was out of whack enough to give you fuel out the tailpipe, again, it would not be running well at all.

 

The smell is of fuel I believe. Its not bluish at all.

I don't run it any longer than 1 minute though. I watch the temperature gauge. Could that really be a problem.

 

Also there is a lot of vibration while its running. My rearview mirror was going crazy and the car was shaking me up.

 

The temp gauge isn't going to work without coolant in the engine. And without coolant, the heat that the engine develops won't have anywhere to go, it will just soak the engine. I wouldn't run a rotary for even 15 seconds without coolant in it.

Shaking at idle is also a symptom of a bad apex seal. Time for a ghetto compression check (search that term if you are not familiar).

 

Ok last night I put coolant in the system.
Reason I didn't was to see if anything else came out the exhaust since I had that coolant seal issue and she was just burning water.

I used your alumaseal stuff from your archived thread and so far the smoke is gone.
Did it last night and let it idle for 20 minutes. Let it cool down. Started her back up and still good.
Came out this morning and started her up and there was only a tiny puff.

I have a strong feeling that it worked.

As for the vibration it seems better now.

And I did check compression both hand cranking and letting the starter crank it over with the pump disconnected. That was pretty loud. Sounds were even so I'm guess I'm ok there.

 

Never run a rotary w/o water. Not only does the engine need coolant to extract waste heat, the pump needs water/coolant to lubricate it and remove waste heat from it. Glad the alumaseal worked for you. It often doesn't.

 

What do you mean "it often doesn't" Trochoid?

By my count I'm 14 out of 15 so far, and the one failure was a 2nd gen that was blasting exhaust gasses into the radiator, so I never figured it would work on that one anyway.

Its statements like that that get nasty internet rumors started!

 

I stand corrected. Didn't know it had such a high success ratio. That does suprise me.

 

lol, no problem man. My motor has something like 18,000 miles on it now since I used the Alumaseal. No problems. Its funny, but not a single person at the Deals Gap meet would've guessed that my motor has blown coolant seals. Hell, I put 2,400 miles on the car over the course of five days and didn't use a drop of water.

If you no longer have any symptoms, does that mean that you're cured?

 

It's kind of like putting a bandage over a gun shot wound. The bleeding may have stopped, but you still don't know how bad the little wankel is hurt.

 

Hmm, I never thought that simply putting a bandage over a shotgun wound would "eliminate all symptoms".

"Technically", I had to pull my motor and rebuild it nearly 20,000 miles ago. Instead I spent $4.00 and have been driving it happily and without problems for a couple of years. And, ahem, symptom free, I might add.

But I understand that a repair like this will never satisfy the purists out there. But some of us have families to support, and bills to pay, and jobs to get to....