Mark: Hi, it's Mark Bossert. I'm here with Bernie Pawlik, Pawlik Automotive in Vancouver. Vancouver's best auto service experience. 25 times voted best auto repair in Vancouver by their customers. We're talking cars. How are you doing Bernie?
Bernie: Doing very well.
Mark: So today we're talking about a 2014 Jaguar. What was going on with this vehicle?
Bernie: Yeah. So this beautiful red convertible came to our shop running very rough, the engine was running very roughly, a check engine light on. That was the owner's complaint.
Mark: So what'd you do to diagnose it?
Bernie: Well, we started up and verified it was in fact rough. There's a lot of knocking sounds from the engine as well, which was a little concerning, but we scanned for codes performed diagnostic tests. Pretty lengthy test because a lot of things are buried in this engine, hard to access things like spark plugs and ignition coils and things. We verified that at least two of the fuel injectors were bad.
Mark: So where do you proceed from there?
Bernie: So where we proceed is we'd recommend the customer to replace all of the injectors. This is a common issue on this particular model of vehicle. And the reason why, which we'll get into in a little bit, is moisture can seep in through the hood, get onto the engine and kind of work its way into the injector where the injectors sit, and eventually it damages the fuel injectors. So a little bit of a design flaw in the vehicle.
Mark: It's a small one. So let's, yeah, let's have a look at some pictures. So there's our Jaguar.
Bernie: There it is.. F type convertible. Gorgeous looking car, supercharged. So it's a nice quick three litre V6. That's kind of all you need in this car. I mean, you could put a V8 in it and they probably, I'm not sure if they do come with V8s.
Mark: What's this pointing to?
Bernie: This is pointing to the hole in the hood. This is like hood vent on both sides. This is where the water gets in and goes onto the engine. The engine has covers but somehow it seeps its way and works its way through because this is a problem that's common on this particular model of car and not others. This engine is used in a variety of different Jaguar and Land Rover platform vehicles and probably doesn't have the same issue. But this car, it's common.
Mark: So why would they put a vent there just for better, to feed the supercharger air, fresh air?
Bernie: Yeah. I think it keeps things under the hood cool and ventilates heat. Also it looks pretty cool.
Mark: Until you have to fix it.
Bernie: Yeah, exactly. There's obviously some slight bit of a design flaw.
Here, what we're looking at is one of the engine banks with the fuel injectors and ignition coils removed. So the red arrow is pointing to one of the cylinder banks. You can actually see some, you look way down at the bottom of that tube, you can see a bit of an oranginess and that is a bit of corrosion that's sort of left over once we pull the fuel injectors out. The black tubes beside it, that's where the spark plugs sit and the ignition coils slipped down in that tube. So there's a lot going on in that particular area there.
If we look up at the top, this is a picture of the two fuel rails. The fuel rails are what supply the fuel to the fuel injectors. And if you look on the left, you can see three injectors on the right. There's two. I just took the picture before the last injector was pulled out. But if you note that the injector on the top, it's kind of sitting on top of that razor blade there. You can notice a bit of corrosion on that metal area there. That's not present on some of the others. And that was 1 of the cylinders that had the misfire.
There's two in particular that repeated the misfire. There's there was a 3rd one that was there originally, but sometimes when you have misfire code, sometimes 1 cylinder can cause another 1 to create a misfire, but usually it's best to just go after whatever, you know, the most common ones are. So we knew we had two of them for sure.
Mark: What kind of mileage was there on this car?
Bernie: I think about 80,000 kilometres, I'm guessing. It wasn't super high. The car looks like brand new still. It's in good shape. So there are options for repairing and it's an expensive job. So the owner said, Hey, can we just do the two injectors and not do four of them? Well, first of all, they were both on separate banks of the engine. If you're doing the injectors, and you've got one on one side, one on the other, you've got to take the fuel rail off and everything else apart to change two other injectors just involves the cost of the injectors, which again, aren't cheap. But you know, there's not a lot of extra service and labour time to change the other two injectors.
And it's a common fault. Better to do them all, you know, bite the bullet, do it all properly, do it now. And should be theoretically at the very least good for another 80,000 kilometres and 10 years before the problem happens, even if they even own the car.
Mark: Is there any fix in terms of blocking off those hood vents?
Bernie: We didn't look to do anything like that. I think based on the amount of time, you know, 10 years on the car, it's not like next week or month or year it's going to happen again. It probably takes a great deal of time for things to work their way in. So we just made sure everything was reinstalled exactly like factory and it should be good for quite a while.
Mark: And so how'd the vehicle run once all the repairs were done?
Bernie: Well, I mentioned earlier that there was some noises in the engine and we figured a lot of that was because the engine was misfiring. And in fact, that was the case. I mean, it ran smooth, nice smooth six cylinder engine but there was still a knocking noise in the engine. And we determined the supercharger nose cone was worn, which was kind of common. And obviously knocking worse with the engine misfiring because it's causing things to kick back and forth and kick in ways that it doesn't normally do that. So I was kind of worried maybe the timing chain was even making some noises, but it wasn't. The supercharger nose cone was noisy. So we didn't replace it on this service, but it's in there for a future repair.
Mark: And what happens if that fails?
Bernie: Well, I've never seen one actually fail so badly that it comes apart, but normally what happens is they just rattle and it irritates the owner so much that everyone just replaces them. But what could happen is that the supercharger itself just will not spin, if that were to break. I don't know if that's even physically possible, and again, we have other podcasts that have the supercharger nose cone in it, but if that piece breaks, it's basically a coupler that has some play in it. And so I think you'd end up having so much play that the rattle could get insanely loud.
Mark: There you go. If you're looking for service for your Jaguar in Vancouver, the guys to see are Pawlik Automotive. You can book online at their website pawlikautomotive.com or you can book by calling them (604) 327-7112. You have to book ahead. They're always busy. Pawlik Automotive, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Thanks so much for watching and listening. Thanks Bernie.
Bernie: Thanks Mark. Thanks for watching.
