Hey y'all,
I am in a but of a head scratcher here trying to get my 245 to pass emissions in Portland. I cleaned the breather box and installed and new flame trap in it and went to do another emissions test and the hydro carbons and carbon got even worse. It did stop the oil leak I was having from the rear cam seal and I was feeling like it was less smelly, but now my carbon went up from 11% to 13% and the hydro carbons went up from around 400 to 940.

Kind of at a loss for what else to check out. I had considered that the cat was bad but I'm not sure why it has gotten worse with a clean breather box and flame trap. I got this car last week and need to make this ready to be a daily for my wife before I go long haul trucking for a few weeks.

When we got it and I checked out the breather box the flame trap was actually just dangling there and not even hooked up and some vacuum hoses were unattached. I got them put back together with some help from Lee at Vol-tech around the corner from my house. I thought putting the flame trap together clean as well as the breather box would at least bring my emissions down not up. Any suggestions is appreciated.

Oh also I did a oil and air filter change. Terrible mpg right now too.

 

PCV systems take the blow-by gasses and return into the intake to burn any HCs so it sounds like you may need to clean the intakem throttle body and air metering (not sure if your year has a MAF or an older mechanical system. If you have a MAF, clean it with MAF cleaner as some carb cleaners can damage the wire filaments). Have you looked at the plugs? they may be fouled and you may be due plugs/wires/rotor/cap etc. Last thought is, it may be your unburnt HCs has fouled the O2 sensor so now its allowing the engine to run rich.

 

Sure there is a MAFS but that's not the problem. You need to address "tune up" items to bring this to stage 0, go from there. You are talking about the neglected flame trap, sounds like other items may need attention too.

 

I put on new a new cap, wires and am gonna look into cleaning the intake and such. I got new plugs but realized I'm missing the socket I need to get them out. O2 sensor will be on it as soon as I can afford it. Thanks y'all. I put a new catylitic converter on it yesterday hoping I'd make it at least pass emissions but I still failed.

 

11% CO - that is extremely rich - Are you sure it's not 1.1%? Your car would still fail your e test due to the high (940) HC. HC is unburned gasoline. High fuel pressure could cause both high co and hc, that's controlled by the fuel pressure regulator, but they usually don't fail in that manner. They do get a leak in the diaphragm - is there fuel in the vacuum line going to the pressure regulator and leaking into the intake manifold? Sometimes injectors don't close off all the way and drip fuel when not open, that would cause high HC.

It was a good thing to change the oil, running rich will contaminate the oil with gas, and cause high HC.

A new convertor if working can certainly lower both HC and CO (and CO2) - what you or a shop really needs is an exhaust analyzer to be able to test whenever you make a change rather than getting bounced back and forth to the testing station. Unfortunately you have no self-diagnostics on a car that old - so your only choice is old school diagnostic methods.

One thing I would try is leaving the O2 sensor disconnected (if your state will allow that) - even though an O2 sensor can't change the mixture very much a bad one can cause an e test failure. It is possible a bad air mass meter could cause the high CO - but that would be a very expensive guess at this point. Does you Air mass meter have a mixture adjustment screw? (I forgot when that stopped) Clockwise on that adjustment is leaner, and it allegedly only changes idle mixture, there is no stop on the screw, the drive mechanism (adjusting screw) for it just continues to spin when you get to the end of the travel.

Anytime you go for an Etest, make sure to drive the car hard for a few minutes right before you get there - to heat the converter up and hopefully get it to be as efficient as it can be.

 

Yeah I'm sure, it's 11% I have numerous print outs of it at this point lol. I checked the vacuum line, no fuel indicating the injectors aren't closing off. At this point I have done all of the tune of stuff. I was planing on doing the temp sensor too and hoping that would solve this. Through all of the tune up stuff I've done there's been no difference in the number. It's also annoying because if I wanna see if it's getting better I have to drive back to the emmisions test site.

New cap and rotor, new cat, new O2 sensor, new plugs, throttle and intake manifold are clean, new wires, have tried 2 different used working MAFs I got from the Volvo shop next to my house.

 

Adjusting the screw on the MAF doesn't do anything, I've been sure to drive it good before testing even once going on the highway in second for a while as instructed by the Volvo dude by my house. When I did that I actually went up to 13% carbon and 900 hydro carbon. The first time I tested it was at 11% and 400 or so hc. As of today it was 11% and like 500 and something. Definitely starting to feel very defeated with this because of our time line of needing this to be a daily

 

What does the Volvo shop next door say? After replacing all those parts you shouldn't be getting such bad readings unless the motor is pretty worn out or you are missing something else pretty major.

 

Volvo shop dude seems to be at a loss. He gave me a couple used computers that sit on the passenger side under the kick panel on the right to see if that main computer was bad, no change at all with either of them. I'm wondering if the ignition timing is off but I don't have access to a time light to be able to check that out and the Volvo dude can only help so much without being in trouble with the higher ups at the shop. I don't believe it's the valves because the spark plugs and O2 sensor did not show signs of bad valves. The engine has compression as well.

 

Idk if it's the fuel regulator maybe allowing to much to come back through the lines? He said something about smelling the dip stick for gas, which I did and wasn't prominently smelling anything I would tell to be gas. I'm sure by testing for that scent it'd be pretty obvious.

 

Timing is set by the computer, so no timing light will help. If you are smelling gas in the oil then may be you have bad injector(s) making it run too rich.