Barnahadnagy

Hi all, I've had my FC (86 GXL, stock) for a few months now. My plan was, and still is, to have it in its original condition, and have been making good progress towards this. However, there are some issues I could not quite figure out:

• Temperature gauge reads halfway, seems stable, might have went slightly above half on the highway, or it might have been my eyes playing on me (it was only a few minutes of highway, it has not been pushed hard otherwise either)
• There is a squeeky noise when the car is warm and idle (belts seem fine)
• There is a burnt smell in the engine bay after warming up (not sure what kind of burnt smell)

Recently I found out that the water pump is leaking from the weep hole. The leak is slight but I grounded the car for the time being (new pump is on its way, its a good opportunity to replace the belts, thermostat, and paint the housing as well). With all this, could the burnt smell and squeek be caused by the water pump? If not, what could be causing those, especially the burnt smell? The temperature might be fine, I'm not convinced its an actual problem (just read that its supposed to read 1/4).

PS: I'll probably make a picture / mini-build thread in the 2nd gen section when its done, don't think my work on it quite warrants a proper build thread.

Copeland

iTrader: (42)

Stock coolant gauges on these cars are notoriously unreliable for telling the temperature of the car. Usually by the time they move, it's already too hot to be driving. H is usually engine damage territory. Get an aftermarket gauge.

The squeaking will require a video or you'll need to investigate this more. This could be a lot of things.

Burnt smells can be a lot of things, you may need to have a mechanic identify this if you are unable to trace down the source. This could be problematic so it should be identified ASAP.


It's possible this is the water pump causing all of these issues but it's very hard to determine with the information given.

Barnahadnagy

Might grab a video on the weekend, but I might just wait until the new pump arrives and see how that goes. As far as more info goes, I only got the car for a few months at this point, and ran it a negligible amount. Overall tho, I don't think the squeaking (nor the leak) was there during the first time(s) it ran. The burnt smell is weird, it does not smell like exhaust or plastic, or anything I know really. Its definitely coming from the engine bay and seems more or less evenly distributed in there. Outside its not always apparent, so its not a particularly strong odor. I did plugs and wires (and a compression test) before I noticed the smell. The squeak appeared sometime later (say... 20 minutes of runtime at most, to get up/down to/from the trailer).

As for the aftermarket gauge, that'd be against the "stock car" project so I'll pass on that (for now ).

Barnahadnagy

Just a quick update on this, replaced belts, tensioner pulley bearings, water pump, thermostat, and cleaned a lot of things, including removing a ton of junk from the radiator fins, and a blob of oil-goo-abomination that almost looked alive from under the exhaust manifold heatshield. All this gave me a slightly below 1/4 temperature and a big lack of squealing. The belts were not too bad so I'm leaning towards the waterpump being the source of the sound. Couldn't reproduce it out of the car though.

Smell is gone too, I suspect that got more to do with the aforementioned blob-of-thing. Finally, I'll test the old thermostat just out of curiosity to see if that caused the slightly higher temperature. All-in-all, apart of the leaky MOP (yay more things to fix... sometime...) I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

mazdaverx713b

iTrader: (91)

Sounds like you solved the issue. The water pump bearing may have been causing the noise as could one of the tensioner pulley bearings.

Barnahadnagy

Yeah, only a few more things left on my list, like the clock, wiper relay, and the MOP leak. Oh and the input shaft bearing. Its hard to find willpower to replace that and fix the MOP just when I could be driving in the nice summer weather... Apart of these, it is pretty much perfect fortunately, so I think I'll post up some images after I take it on the first real trip.