You Can't Kill A Zetec!

 I've often said it.

Having known a few folks with Zetecs in kits, tuned, supercharged, whatever, doing fast road, track days etc, I've never known one blow up.

So why am I telling you this? Well, a week or so ago I took the Stylus to North Weald Aerodrome for the last of the "Drive Limits" days - it seems Google has bought the land to put a data centre on, because we just can't have too many 13 year old's make-up tips, cat videos, or photos of our lunches.

I set off early - very early. I really didn't want to sit on the M25 past the M4 & M40, so I was up with the lark & gone. I still didn't beat Duncan there though. I think he set off after putting the lark to bed.

Over the next half hour or so other folk arrived, a few kits, a selection of Corvettes (C2 to C8) & a smattering of tin-tops

As usual the day began with accelerating along a straight, then turning left, increasing speed until the car spun. I started with a couple of 0-60 runs, but didn't improve my time over Gurston Down - the first part of the straight was both dusty & lumpy, so I was getting some wheelspin.

After I'd done that a couple of times I settled down & just did the cornering, then my lovely girlfriend arrived & started taking photos, some of which I present here, this first one was taken through haze, my girlfriend hates it because "it's not good enough". I like it, it's not a perfect photograph, but I like it as an image.

Up to now I had been watching the gauges more carefully than I usually do, just because the car was either accelerating furiously, or sat in a queue, but everything looked just fine.

Still looking happy at this point

At this point there was a break for lunch, so I rolled off the last corner & parked up next to my girlfriend's car & the chairs & picnic table came out, closely followed by the picnic which the aforementioned lovely girlfriend had bought along - smoked salmon & cream cheese sandwiches, crisps & a mini pork pie - very nice.

In the afternoon the day gets more interesting as a "track" is laid out in cones & people drive round one at a time trying not to spin out. I started the car - it was clearly running on three cylinders.

This was not a good thing.

I opened the bonnet & gave it a hard stare - it carried on running on three cylinders.

It was clearly getting sparks, so it must be the injectors yes? Unplugging them one at a time showed that No. 4 wasn't contributing. This wasn't good news as I don't really know what bike they came from, which makes finding spares - tricky.

I wondered if the rubber connector between the inlet manifold & the throttle body had become mis-aligned letting air in, but I was struggling with the minimum tooling I was carrying. I flagged Duncan down & one or two others & assembled a tool kit & one or two people were kind enough to miss a couple of runs trying to find the fault to no avail. After an hour or so I decided it was time to call in the lorry, so after some confusion with a website, I was picked up directly - no waiting an hour for a man in a van to say "you need a lorry - it'll be here in two hours" when I knew I needed a lorry from the start. Lantern Recovery were excellent & arrived in 50 mins. In fact we didn't have any trouble at all getting home, not even with the M25 & the driver regaled me with stories of all the electric cars he'd been called out to.

So the fault finding began in earnest. The first thing I realised was that there was no compression at all in cylinder No.4. Then I found the oil catch tank, which I look at once a year & never has more than a dribble of oily water in it, was 1/4 full of oil. It was looking worse. Then I took off the throttle bodies, the photo is the back (engine side) of No. 4 butterfly & yes the bright specks are metal fragments.

It didn't look good. It looked like I had killed a Zetec

When I bought this engine in 2022 to replace a Silvertop that had run air cooled for a couple of hours & still didn't fail, I just went to the local scrappie & had my choice of six 2.0 Zetecs for £350 each. now, there are none to be had. There are no cars with them in because ULEZ scrapped them all & the new crate engines like I bought for the Fury for £600 delivered are now around £3,000 & have been in a crate for 21 years.

I needed to consider my options carefully. I was pretty down about the whole thing at this stage. That night I dreamt I'd holed the piston, but a poke around with a borescope the following morning showed it was fine - apart from all the oil & the metal shavings obviously.

I spent the next few days at my girlfriends house & came home determined to stop sulking & turn a problem into a project. I had decided to take the head off the engine to see what was what, but having taken the cam cover off I found I lacked the very long torx driver that's needed, so I put one on order. 

After it arrived I sallied forth & immediately noticed a thing.

One of  No.4's inlet valve followers was lower than the other - not by a little bit. I removed the inlet manifold to see what I could see - & peering down the intake tract, I saw - a bolt head, the picture's rubbish I know.

I knew the bolt had come from one of the trumpets & I thought "I bet I used stainless bolts", but no! A magnet stuck very firmly to one of the bolts still in place on the trumpet, so very gingerly indeed I turned the engine to push on that valve & lifted the offending item out.

And there it is. The missing threads are the source of the debris in the inlet tract.

Investigations continued, feeler gauges under the cam suggested the valve was now fully closed, a compression tester had to be used with the rubber cone type end on as the threaded adaptor isn't deep enough for the Zetec. It registered 125psi before it blew off - I was on my own & had one hand on the starter button in the middle of the dash, the other pushing on the tester half way down the engine bay.

With all this news being positive I decided to do some other jobs I now had access to before re-building the inlet side & starting the engine. I couldn't do any more damage than had already been done & having done that, it fired up beautifully & settled into a smooth idle, better than it usually does in fact. I left it to warm up & all the gauges did their usual things, then I turned it off & checked the catch tank. there was a dribble of oil in it, I suspect it's just left over from emptying it, but I shall be watching it closely.

As I write I haven't driven it on the road, partly because it has no bonnet (yeah, right - as if that's going to stop me), but mostly because I have some drilled bolts on order to replace the ones holding the trumpets on. This time they'll be WIRE-LOCKED.

So this is why I say you can't kill a Zetec, though I'll admit I may still find there's a problem when I try driving it. My guess is that the bolt, having escaped from trumpet No.1, made its way back to trumpet No.4, was thrown about by the bumpy bit of track & rattled around above the valve. When I stopped for lunch, the engine happened to stop with No.4 inlet valves open & it dropped in. I checked my videos as part of my investigations, all of the gauges were always normal & there was no smoke from the exhaust, so hopefully this is the end of this particular story.

On the up-side, it gave me the opportunity & the access to re-paint the chassis where a gush of hydraulic oil stripped it when trying to bleed the brakes some time ago as well as one or two other small jobs which got dealt with.