My exhaust has been periodically smoking. I recently replaced my water pump and had a leaking hose. While looking for the leak I had the bottom cover off and the front on jack stands and ran the engine looking for the leak. I found it easy enough, bottom radiator hose wasn't tight enough coming off the radiator..fixed that no problem.

While the car was running and jacked up the exhaust was smoking enough to make you think there was a small fire. Got the hose tightened and drove the car around the block and the exhaust cleared up. However, the exhaust will smoke, sometimes pretty badly..but always sporadically. From what I've read I fear a coolant seal, but after tightening the hose I'm not loosing any coolant. IIRC it's been 2-3 weeks since I found the leaking hose. I checked my coolant tonight and it's hardly low at all.

I've read in other threads that periodic smoking can be related to AWS. My car has no AWS on it, only BAC and thermowax (IIRC on the thermowax...I'll look next time the TMIC is off). Can either of those cause smoking exhaust? What about a coolant problem related to the turbo?

 

bump for a little help

 

It's normal for a little smoke at startup. Is it white?does it smell sweet? If it's a coolant seal you can usually see a stream of bubble when the rad cap is removed.

 

Leaving now to do some work on the car, my parent's house is a better setup for working on the car so it sits there for such things. I've been keeping an eye on coolant levels from the leak I had and simply monitoring things after putting the new water pump on. I haven't noticed any bubbles while topping off and bleeding air out of the system.

I've been sticking my nose in the smoke and having never smelled coolant in exhaust before..hell I don't know if it smells sweet or not. I put some paper over a tailpipe to see if there was oil and the paper was clean.

It will smoke on start up..but then also after it's been warmed up and driven.

I'm starting to read up on using stop-leak, but need to find out more. What I've read so far is that if you catch a coolant seal soon enough that stop-leak can help delay the inevitable. I want to find out just how safe it is to use on a rotary.

Regardless of the stop-leak I'm going to look into renting or buying a compression tool and test things...just not sure when I'll have the time.