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Old 06-17-2020, 03:51 PM
Mike1261 Mike1261 is offline
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Hard starts - worse the longer it sits

This issue has existed since we bought the car 2 years ago:

First start of the morning is rough and idle RPM can't come up on it's own. A blip of the throttle clears the issue and the rest of the day (even if I stop and start it later on) is fine and starts right up immediately even if the engine is let to cool.

If I leave it for a couple weeks between starts, it takes some extra cranking and is even more stumbly, but it clears itself and everything is good again.

We just had the car parked for 3 months. To make sure the cylinders didn't fill with any kind of fluid over 3 months I popped the spark plugs out and cranked it to clear out the cylinders. Nothing came out.

Then when I went to actually start it, it took several minutes of cranking attempts to get it to come alive.

During the cranking, it didn't seem to be sparking at all. The engine was just turning, and I thought maybe the ignition system was F'd. But eventually it started to try and fire, but couldn't quite catch. And then finally after another minute or so of "almost" starting, voila it started and we had lots of blueish smoke and some whiteish smoke.

My #6 cylinder is slightly low on compression, and a while back my #6 plug was so fouled that the car was rendered immobile. All the plugs look good right now though and have a good 5K+ miles on them.

The white smoke and lack of spark made me wonder if perhaps I had a head gasket leak and the pressurized cooling system was pushing coolant into the cylinder.

I relieved all the pressure from the cooling system one night, started it to clear the cylinders, then left it overnight. In the morning the car started right up. But knowing it could be fluke, I repeated the same thing 2 nights ago, just started it up, and it was back to hard starting/needing a throttle blip to bring the RPM to a stable idle.

I was hoping it would crank right up and I could go buy some Bar's Head Gasket Repair to throw into the radiator and fix the issue. But I'm not sure that that's my issue at this point as the system wasn't pressurized so probably not able to push much coolant into the cylinder.

I don't know if it's leaky valve stem seals and oil is getting into the cylinders, or leaky injectors flooding the cylinders, or something else entirely. I haven't completely ruled out head gasket coolant leak, but I don't seem to have the other telltale signs that go along with it. No bubbles in the radiator, no loss of coolant, no overheating, no sludge in the engine oil etc.

All I know is a simple fact: The longer it sits the worse it starts, and when it sat for months it didn't even try to fire the cylinders until it "cleared" whatever was in the cylinders causing it to not fire.

What am I missing??
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2006 BMW X5, 3.0i - 133,000 miles
2003 Ford Mustang GT - because having Two cars that keep dying seemed more exciting.
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