I thought this would make an interesting post. I've been e-mailing Andy Sanchez off and on for a while trying to unload MY wagon. In the process, he's bought three or four cars and dumped most of them. His latest acquisition is a 1983 (or 84) 244T. Real nice looking car from the pictures I've seen, but it had sat for about two years and wasn't smogged.

I think he's tried three or four times to smog the car (on that wonderful Smog Check II dyno for you guys in California), and failed miserably.

Lots of stuff was replaced (wires, o2 sensor, vaccum hoses, injectors, catalytic converter, fuel distributor), mixture was adjusted to full lean (and then the car failed on NOx, otherwise the car would fail on all three.. was running way rich). Car still failed miserably, and I believe even started to run worse. Frequency valve buzzed as expected, no visible fuel leaks.

Should I stop? Anyone wanna field a guess here?

Well, take a look at this:



Turns out the heater element was completely shot. He did reconnect everything to the CPR and blew the #7 fuse after three minutes, and with every restart.

With a nice used 079 CPR from the junkyard and the car apparently runs much better (and I bet it'll smog on the next try).

Oh, I still despise K-Jetronic injection, but it's nice to know that sometimes it pays to swap parts ;-)

- alex

'85 244 Turbo
'84 245 Turbo