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Blue smoke ephemera
9. I noticed blue smoke one day accelerating out of stop and shifting to
> 2nd, but I can't reproduce it again. It doesn't seem to be the seals.
> (I can accerlate hard, lift my foot off the gas a bit, then floor it
> again and no blue cloud, which I'm told is the test for this.) Is this
> just normal sometimes? Was I driving it too cold? (The car had been
> going more than 5 minutes but not much more)>
If you can't reproduce it, don't worry about it.
This came up last summer as Joe Kollmann and I tried to understand why the
former Nuvolari (nephew of Beloved Driver) GTV-6 smoked embarrassingly from a
stop, but not at other times.
We drove around watching behind the car; it left a cloud of smoke pulling away
from most stops but sure enough, seemed to run clean other times. So we
decided I'd follow him on a freeway blast. After a few blocks, I pulled him
over and returned home.
The car smoked constantly. From a stop, the smoke ballooned out visible from
the cockpit, but at anything above about 20 mph, the aerodynamics of the
square tail with its semi-spoiler cut the smoke off clean at the rear end. It
made a swirling vortex out down, out, and up to just below the line of sight
from the cockpit.
I'll bet a duckie tailed Spider will do the same thing.
Also, cars that have been smoking put a layer of sludge on and around the
entire rear end. You may need to remove the license lights, for instance, and
clean their insides. Mr. Kollmann's GTV-6 is immaculately "restored," but was
stopped recently for "no license plate lights." He hadn't noticed that they
were internally coated to opacity with former smoke.
Peace,
Joe
Portland
'72 PIR Slut: she used to smoke and drink, (oil) but reformed to enjoy her
middle years
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