Italian Tune Up

It seems that I was right to be worried about the car's smoking exhaust - a trip to the garage has revealed a split in some hose or other, which is connected to the exhaust system.  It's repairable.  Not cheaply, mind you and the part can only be supplied by a main dealer - and they can't get it to the garage until tomorrow.  It could have been much worse - it could have been a fault with the injectors, which would have been hugely expensive to rectify.  In the meantime, tired of all that soot in the exhaust system, I gave the car an 'Italian Tune Up' yesterday.  This entailed parking up, putting it into neutral and booting the accelerator pedal.  The results were spectacular - huge clouds of soot blowing out of the tail pipe and rolling away like low flying thunder clouds.  There was so much soot expelled that it left a huge black mark on the tarmac behind the car.  Suffice to say that I won't ever be able to shop again the Crapchester Tesco store after doing that in their car park.

Not good for the environment, I'll admit, but it was bloody good fun, taking me back to my younger days.  If you are wondering about the presence of soot in a car exhaust system, it is simply the residue of unburned diesel fuel.  When under 'full load' (going uphill or accelerating rapidly) diesel engines typically 'overfuel', injecting more diesel into the cylinders than can be properly burned - that's what the black smoke you sometimes see coming out a diesel vehicle's exhaust whilst going up a steep hill: unburned fuel being expelled in the form of soot.  Most modern diesel engines employ various technologies to minimize the amount of such emissions - it is part of my car's system which has failed, resulting in a build up of sooty deposits in the exhaust, which are now being blown out when the engine is under load.  The result of the 'Italian Tune Up' and the work done by the garage today, the smoke levels this afternoon were far lower.  Once the repairs are completed tomorrow, I hopefully won't be gassing the unfortunate motorists behind me as the car lays down a smokescreen every time I go uphill.  That said, choking a few cyclists with my emissions was quite amusing...