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This seems to be a recent problem that has been becoming substantially worse over the past few days. I was hoping to put troubleshooting off a bit, but I fear things might head south very fast if I don't.
I'm going to mention that I do know the car has a leaking exhaust gasket due to the P/O stripping the threading on the mount points for the exhaust manifold's studs and things were running decently for a while, but a new problem has appeared.
After letting the car run for a while and generally using it normally, I can find a good amount of exhaust pouring out of the two headlight openings. Once I shut off the engine, the flow stops nearly immediately. From what I can tell, the source of the leak in question is on the intake side, possibly in or around the breather box, but it doesn't seem reasonable that such a volume of fumes could come out from this area.
This has followed a series of spark-related misfire problems (water leaked onto the distributor cap and through low-quality shrouds, managed to do cause corrosion) which were thought to be fixed, but appear to still show up on rainy days (as opposed to every day, I guess). But this isn't the problem. It's just a well-timed (hopefully unrelated) trouble spot.
Could this have anything to do with the head gasket? the car is just about to break 144k and is on its first, but a friend who was kind enough to assist this last week may have severely over-tightened the nuts holding exhaust manifold in place and I fear this might have caused some form of warping. The only thing I could imagine happening would be an intake-side leak from one of the cylinders, but I am not knowledgeable enough to confirm whether or not this is a physical possibility.
Could it just be the breather box, which was replaced within the last 10,000 miles (presumably by the family mechanic, I was not in possession of the car at the time) having prematurely cracked or started leaking around the base?
Once the car has warmed up, I don't hear an abnormal "putt-putt-putt" sound of any sort as I would suspect from an exhaust leak (But I do know that one does exist as one of the gaskets is clearly going bad), but I'm guessing a compression test would resolve the matter of leakage from a cylinder fairly quickly, and that sealing off the exhaust and compressing that would produce similar confirmation of other leaks were they do exist.
Yes, a good deal of question marks here, but I'm fairly green when it comes to these manner of car repairs. The will to learn exists, motivated by raw necessity! If things came down to it, I do actually have a spare non-warped head handy from a non-turbo, but if memory serves me correctly, I would need to swap over the valves and camshaft to make proper use of this. (not something I would mind doing, but not something I would *prefer* to do right now)
My only true limitation is money right now, but I have a '90 non-turbo 740 wagon to pick parts from as needed.
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1987 740 GLE, 1988 740 Turbo Intercooler, 1990 740 GL, 1993 850 GLT
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