hi guys,have noticed smoke coming from driver's side exhaust pipe,only seems to happen when car is left to idle after a run,dosn't seem to smoke under normal driving conditions.someone told me it might be oil seals in the turbo itself & it will need refurb.any ideas?cheers daren.

what colour is teh smoke? if its on idle but not while driving its possibly the pcv valves.

smoke is a grey colour,but smells oily mate.

It could be the PCV valves and that's sure the cheapest repair of the two possibilities mentioned above!

 

I had a similar problem on my old red ZX; I changed the PCV valves and it did cure the problem for a year or two.....

 

....So give that a go first. If it does turn out to be the turbo rear seals then, unless the car is getting through serious amounts of oil, I'd live with it. My old car rarely needed topping up, even after a long fast run; and the performance did not seem to be suffering. It never failed an MOT on emissions either so I left it alone - in fact the more I used the car, the better it seemed to be!

 

Richard:cool3:

it doesn't seem to be using any noticable amounts of oil,some times it smokes for a couple of minutes then stops.

sounds like pcv valves. there not mega expensive. do a search on it see it it sounds simular.

http://www.zcentre.co.uk/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&page=shop.browse&category_id=72&Itemid=7

Yep, as above.

Best case - PCVs

Worse case - Turbo replacement/refurb time.

Greyish white is turbos, greyish blue is PCV. lets hope it's the latter.

Is there anything that he can do to the PCV valves? Is the problem that they get blocked? Can they be cleaned out or anything? Or is just a case of getting them replaced?

Replace them. Cheap and easy.

Or take them out to see if they are blocked first.

if it was me i'd be hoping it was the turbo's so i could justify buying bigger ones :thumbup: