Loud M20

[SedanSandwich]

my M20 has a very loud ticking sound and it seems to be coming from the injectors. I looked through the M20 loud valve train thread but i'm not sure that it would be valves as the PO who sold me the car had the engine rebuilt by a shop. he put about 150 miles on it. any suggestions on what I should check and what you would use for cleaning injectors etc... heres a video of the noise. thanks. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f26aMqSDvT4

[whodwho]

If it was rebuilt at a shop I would take it to them, they probably should be doing follow up valve adjustment.

[lole30]

cleaning injectors should be done professionally. send them out to witchhunter performance or rc engineering for cleaning services.

They will also be able to flow bench your injectors to see if they are working properly.

[SedanSandwich]

The shop is in the Portland area so driving there isn't an option. the PO said they adjusted the valves after the rebuild. today I noticed it has a different radiator than stock and it does not seem to be mounted in well. It moves quite a bit up and down and slightly to the left/right. is it possible that the noise is the fan shroud hitting the fan? thanks for the all the help guys.

[jlevie]

The easy way to tell if the fan is the cause, is to remove the fan and see if the noise goes away. It won't hurt to temporarily have the fan off. Just avoid stop and go traffic or idling for more than a minute.

[SedanSandwich]

will do ASAP. Can I just pull it off? any special tools needed? also I found out the radiator is a Nissens brand made in Denmark. I couldn't find anywhere that the radiator is mounted to the car, can someone point me in the direction of finding where the mounting points for a stock E30 radiator are located/ post pictures of your mounting points?

[enigmaticdream]

It sounds like you need a valve adjustment. The video below is shortly after doing a valve adjustment, maybe a week or two. I've been told they are loud, but I double check my clearance and it was in spec. Your engine sounds like mine prior to the valve adjustment. The ticking is very spastic vs mechanical and exact like mine.



Good luck!

[jlevie]

You will need a thin 32mm wrench and you need to know that the fan nut has a left hand thread. Other than that it is pretty simple to remove the fan. Set the wrench on the nut, hold tension on the wrench and give the wrench a hard smack with a hand sledge. That should break the nut loose.