holy cow i've done some stupid stuff to my car but this tops the list. AND ITS STILL RUNNING. i love these cars.

ok heres the storry:

i recently rigged up a cold air intake that baisically was a cone filter stuck through a hole i cut in the fender with some flexible ducting connecting it to the AFM. the filter was stuck right up against the fender (just fitting in the space above the brake cooling duct) so i didnt realy worry about the possibility of it sucking up water (its about 8 or so inches of the ground).

well i have been dragging my feet on getting the brake cooling duct back on since all its bolts stripped out, so the filter was just hanging out of the fender with nothing below it.

so today, we get the first monsoon rain of the year here in florida and i am driving home right in the thick of it. i inadvertantly dirve through a big (but only about 5 inch deep) puddle at about 40 mph. water splashes up AND THE ENGINE DIES!!!!

im thinking, "oh &hit, i just killed my engine." i try to turn it over, it turns but very slowly while making squishing noises. im distrauht. so i put on the emergency blinkers, pop the hood (the car is still in the left lane of a 4-lane road) and rip of the duct from the filter to the afm. WATER COMES POURING OUT!!!! im almost physically sick to my stomach.


at this point i start thinking about calling it a loss, pushing it off the road, calling a tow truck, and planing my rebuild. but after a minuite of saying "you are a dumb ***" to myself, i remeber that the engine DID turn over and suspect that i fubared the afm. i look in it and water is still draining out

i decide to give it one last feutile try at starting. i crank it over about 4 times, then hold the throttle at about 90%, spark it again AND IT CATCHES!! i rev the poop out of it too keep it from dieing (and because i was so happy that it started again) and a HUGE cloud of steam billows out of my pipes.

man, am i lucky!!

so lessons learned:

-WATER INGESTION CAN HAPPEN TO YOU
-leave the brake cooling duct ON if you have an air pick up in the fender ( im sure this would have never happened if the filter wasnt exposed from the bottom)
-i'm getting an aem cold air bypass valve.


take this as a warning. you might not get lucky like i did!

p.s. who says rotaries arent durable. hehe

 

wow.

 

Well,
Our cars are almost impossible to hydrolock
That's the good news!

Hell people even do the water trick by running a gallon of water through the engine to clean out carbon!

Anyways.
Man you got lucky, Glad it worked out in the end

 

I guess that's one way to do the water trick to clean your engine

 

This is almost funny since you didn't kill it, and you got a free water-injection steam clean out of it, but why install the filter so low in the first place? The heat coming of the road surface 8" away does not make it a "cold" air intake in the first place...Ever walked on an asphalt or dark-colored concrete road barefoot with the sun out?

 

same thing happened to me, driving along not paying attention to flooded neighborhood till i got into some super deep stuff that clogged my stock airbox with water, took the filter off and drained the intake piping haha, then got everything back together and it started right up with a few cranks, and made it home. flash floods get owned by rx7's.

 

Since I drive in Houston also I know EXACTLY what you mean, lol...Did I read correctly- you sucked water in the STOCK intake? That's some deep water, man...I've been in stuff that was over the lower door sills, but never deep enough to inhale it through the stock intake...

 

wouldent cold water touching red hot internal parts crack or warp stuff? maby not..

 

told you guys :-p

 

andrew you got lucky, but you better not tell alex, he would get pissed with your "reliable" s5.

 

the filter isnt all that low, actualy its as high up as it could possibly be while still being outside the engine bay. it sits right behind the fog light, it should be fine once i get the brake duct back on to keep it form getting splashed directly.

 

Yea these rotarys are pretty durable when it comes to water. A couple of summers ago my Ex and I rented some sea doos which use the rotax (small rotary engine) well I was in the middle of lake mead doing 360s and finally flood the engine. get towed back to the marina and pull the things out of the water. I cut the fuel removed the spark plug holes and pumped the water out. Put the plugs in and after about 4 revs the booger started right back up.

The rotary is mighty...

 

I thought rotax is a four cylindar engine.

 

After some gooling, it appears that it is.

But someone has put a 13b into a Seadoo

http://www.rexxracing.com/

 

Neat future project after the car body rusts away

 

Next time that happens, if it does, pull your plugs out. This will allow the engine to get the water out faster/more safely.

 

I still dont understand how splashing in a puddle can cause enough water to travel STRAIGHT UP and into the engine. Water doesn't travel uphill, rememeber, so how does this happen? I've heard it plenty of times, but still never understand.

 

haha ok what happened was like in october or late september i was trying to get to a dr's appointment and there was a terrible storm, i couldnt get through some residentual streets bc they were low and flooded so i was going through my hood to get to westhimer b/c it rarly floods or so i though. i was going down a street where one of my old hs buds lives and i was looking to see if he was home then felt the car start shaking and looked fowared to find i hit a nice low spot in the street that didnt appear to be flooded but definitly was...before i could reverse the back end kinda floated so i had to get out and push it a block and a half to someones house on a hill where i drained it...this was my vert so it was not a fun push. but whatever i mean it didnt miss a beat when i got it running again so no biggie. ive now learned that i need a jeep or something for houston to compliment my collection of s5 rx7s.

 

More like an airboat, ...I HATE taking my baby through any water, but sometimes I have no choice...Last time she flooded on me, I had taken her through about 5" of really COLD water, that chilled the water temp switch on the radiator down so much that the ECU thought it was in cold start mode again, even after driving her another 8 miles before shutdown,and she was flooded next start attempt...lesson learned...

 

To cool the entire radiator down (which is basically what you would have to do to effect that sensor that much), and then flood the engine would be pretty extreme. And then still flooding 8 miles later? I would bet that the cold water was most definatly not the cause of the 'flooding', since the sensor would more than warm itself up by that time, and any excess fuel that had flooded would've burned off within the first 1/4mile.

 

hey, i didnt think it would happen either, but it did.

a running motor creates a signifigant amount of suction. get enough water near the intake, regardless of its orientation (even just a splash or partialy submerged) and water will be finding its way into the engine. its realy not worth chancing, the motor would have very likely been blown if it werent a rotary.

 

Because when you are on the throttle the car is sucking in air from wherever the air filter is...if enough water hits the filter it will be sucked up (think vacuum) into the motor. This sort of thing happend to me a few years back but I had a standard HKS adapter/K&N on my NA (no CAI, the filter was in the engine bay). I didn't have the lower underbelly pan on the car and there was a huge rainstorm that flooded one of our parkways. The car ingested some water and lived (hesitated a lot, never stalled hehe). But anymore than 15% throttle and the car would break up like crazy...I got home and took off the AFM, then turned it upside down. Water came pouring out I spent some time with a hair drier, some rubbing alcohol and a pencil eraser to dry/clean all connections inside. Once the air filter was cleaned/dried, I hooked it all back up and she ran good as new.

 

Yep...its hard to hydrolock a rotary. Some people actually intentionally dump water into the engine to "steam clean" it.

-Joe

 

bumping this post....

this happened to me today, only i think m engine is locked....it turned over n then it was like

clank....
i took off th whole intake rubber piping and water came pouring out.
cleaned everything and then tried to turn it over,

im going to take off the spark plugs and see if water comes out....post again in about 30 min

 

water did come out of them holes =(

how long should i wait for the engine to dry out, and should i get new sparkplugs, or just let them dry out too?

could it just be that since my spark plugs are wet, they wont fire, and create a "locked" sympton?