Well things have taken a turn for the worse today.
I hit quite a harsh bump recently (Townsville people will be familiar with the Dalrymple Rd floodway) and things started to go downhill. I slowed down for the dip and pushed 3rd gear for a hard pull up the other side, for no reason other than to feel the torque and get a little rush :). The car quickly began running rough and shaking quite violently when I tried to put any power through it, and it smelled strongly of fuel. I limped it the 2km or so back home and did a quick walkaround while it idled - roughly - to see if I could find any signs of an obvious fault. I didn't find anything of use except to notice the exhaust was making weird pulses that pulled my hand back onto the pipes sometimes, and I'd almost certainly broken my T56 mount because everything seemed to be moving more than normal.
The next morning I started it up and had another look. With a rough idle and a totally different exhaust note and a smell of fuel I checked out the engine bay to find the driver's side header had separated a little from the head and the rearmost cylinder was spraying fuel vapour out the resulting leak so quickly that it was actually forming droplets in addition to the fine mist. One of the pipes at the rear (the right hand one) was pulsing with vapour (possibly fuel but I couldn't really smell anything on my hand) and the exhaust from the other pipe seemed clear and fine.
I crawled it up the sloped driveway into the shed with difficulty - lost lots of power - and left it there for a couple of days. The odd startup yielded the same symptoms, obviously, since it wasn't going to fix itself.
I've been having trouble starting it lately (unrelated) and the trouble seems to be with the ignition switch itself. I figured that was an easy one I could handle so I pulled it apart and cleaned it up. I put it back on to test whether I'd fixed anything to find out, annoyingly, that if anything I'd made it worse. That's neither here nor there, just a side story. What is relevant here is that when it did finally crank, first it fired lazily and failed after a couple of seconds, then I tried it again and it cranked and fired into life but immediately stopped with a nasty bang and a sound like dribbling fluid, but no sign of any leaks anywhere. Cranking it after that was hit and miss; I couldn't get it to run at all, sometimes the cranking stopped with a nasty clunk and it sounded like the starter would come out and engage the flywheel, but something had jammed it.
Hoping I was wrong about the sound, I tried it again this morning. I just wanted it to run for a few seconds so I'd know the motor was, internally at least, OK.
The cranking started and ended with a pretty horrible bang. The shaft of the starter motor broke in two.
Unsure where to go from here.
