3.0R - 230K, occasonal pinging and rough idling

[jimmyP]

OK guys, so I Have an 04 outback, 230000 on the clock, and have the following symptoms:

- pinging under change of load - so if you're cruising along at say 2500- 3000rpm locked in gear with no load, and give a stab of extra throttle (even a little, i.e not WOT) , it'll ping momentarily - quite audibily. Has been doing this for a while.
- noticed the other day when I started it on an uphill incline, (cold) it was missing on 1 cyl , came good shortly after. this only happend once so far.
- general rougher than normal idling - Has been becoming more apparent recently, and combined with the miss, has me thinking things aren't good.


Plugs were replaced around 15000k ago, No problems otherwise - no noticeable loss of power @ WOT, no hesitation's or anything.

Going to be giving this a big service soon, i'm thinking fuel filter may be a culprit, or dirty AFM, but do these symptoms ring any other bells specifically? I have a Cheap ebay ODBII dongle I can hook up to torque (or whatever is out now, I haven't used it in years), so if there's anything i can look out for it on it would be nice to know!

thanks in adv

[dan_ashcroft]

I had a lot pinging when I first got my car.

From memory... I *think* it was the cracked intake plenum / surge tank that may have been doing it on mine, see http://forum.liberty.asn.au/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=26575&start=30

Ignore the advice in that thread to repair it by soldering iron, it only cracks again in a few weeks - take it to a plastic welder instead. I found an old fella locally in the yellow pages that only cost me $30 and half an hours worth of listening to life stories to get it fixed. (Where are you?)

If it's not that, come back and I'll rack my brains some more to see if there was something else I did.

[jimmyP]

Legend, Thankyou! - Just had a look, and it's indeed cracked. Never would have noticed if I wasn't looking (at least not unless it got a lot worse)

Will attempt a temporary fix with tape or something maybe, just to see if it makes and difference, but will certainly take the advice to fix properly - never had much luck DIY plastic welding myself (I'm in bris BTW)

[vaccine]

i had the same on the plenum before the Throttlebody and ended up using 2 part epoxy which seemed to have worked well so far.