DeTomaso Mailing List: June 2001, Message #55

Why won't everything just work the way it is supposed to on my car? Today I headed north, leaving my high-performance flip-flops home. I thought I noticed smoke in my rear view mirror, but was hoping it was just a figment of my imagination. I stopped at the next rest area, and noticed that indeed, smoke was coming from my engine compartment. 

Skipping the boring details, I have oil on the plug wires on the drivers side, and some dripping down onto the headers. That WILL make smoke. Closer inspection reveals that one of the valve cover bolts has lost its head, in a literal sort of way. Confident that this was the source, I continued. 

I *think* I have noticed a depreciable loss of power, and the engine is running a little rougher. This could be my imagination, I am a pretty paranoid driver... But it is number three bolt, if you start counting from the front of the car, and there's oil on the plugs much further forward - 2 and 3.  The rear window shows splatter marks from oil, and as I returned to my garage my car resembled the Bombay Steamer, with a pretty significant smoke cloud following me. 

Tomorrow I'm going to see what the plugs look like - with all that oil on them maybe one is getting clogged. Then Monday it is back to the local garage and have them pull out the remains of that bolt and replace it to see if the oil leak is taken care of. 

Do these things just fail if you use cheap bolts? Or is this a symptom of something more sinister? 

Getting tired of spending time looking at my engine compartment....

Charlie McCall
1972 DeTomaso Pantera #3847 (for sale)
1985 DeTomaso Pantera GT5-S #9375
"Raising Pantera Awareness across Europe"
http://briefcase.yahoo.com/gt5s_1985