Mk1 Leon dying a slow painful death!!

[Rikaro]

I've browsed the forum's 10 times over and havn't found a solution yet, and I'm getting desperate.

A few months back, my Mk1 1.6 petrol leon developed a whistling at 3000 revs, after reading previous threads and conferring with a number of mechanics I put this down to the EGR being full of crud.

Within the last week though it has now decided that it no longer wants to rev past 3000 revs or go faster than 60mph except for when going down hill!! When stood still however, the engine sounds as smooth as a baby's ass.

I just spent the afternoon removing and checking the EGR (which looked pretty clean)... this has changed nothing, except the whistle now kicks in at 2000 revs.

I am now desperate to solve this as i really couldn't bear the embarassment of being passed by wagons on the motorway.

Any suggestions would be greatly received.

 

[S3 AKR]

Is there any issue with the air intake at all ? Restricting the air going in might well cause this sort of problem. Also, when stood still, will it rev beyond 3000 rpm ? Could it even be fueling or the MAF ? The whistling would have me checking air intakes for holes and splits - if you have a split after the MAF you would have more air going in than the car "knows" about and therefore it would have the mixture all wrong. I don't know if that would cause these symptoms though.

Get it on VAG-COM and look for some errors and run some logs.

I had a MK2 Golf GTi a couple of years ago that starting messing about intermitantly and it turned out to be a fuel filter starting to disintegrate and clogging the lines. It was fine on tick over but when you got the fuel flow rate up with the higher revs it started missing and flat spotting badly.

 

[Rikaro]

I did suspect it could be the fuel and the error codes pointed out that it was a bad fuel mixture.

After getting it on the ramps though, there was a rattling noise coming from the manifold, turns out that the baffle in the cat convertor which is integrated in the manifold came loose.

I actually spent about 4 hours this afternoon removing the manifold because of the crap layout, if anyone is planning a similar job, it involved removing, the air-con unit, altanator and powersteering, just to get to the last bolt on the manifold... freaking knightmare!!!

The replacement manifold will set me back £200 and I have the horrid task of rebuilding the front of the engine afterwards.

Fingers Crossed that this is the cause.