Mechanic & Ignition Repairs for Albert Park

This page is about misfires, which sound expensive and usually are not. It is one of the more common jobs a mechanic Albert Park drivers call gets asked to look at.

A four cylinder engine fires four times every two revolutions. A misfire means one of those did not happen properly. At idle you feel it as a shake or a stumble. Under load it shows up as a flat spot or a hesitation.

The engine notices too. It measures tiny variations in crankshaft speed, and when one cylinder consistently contributes less than the others it logs a misfire for that cylinder and turns on the engine light.

Spark. Plugs wear. The gap widens as the electrode erodes, and a wider gap needs more voltage to jump. Eventually the coil cannot supply it, usually under load first, which is why misfires often appear accelerating before they appear at idle.

Ignition coils fail too, commonly one at a time. Modern coil-on-plug systems make this easy to isolate, because swapping a coil to another cylinder and rescanning shows whether the misfire follows it.

Fuel. A blocked or leaking injector on one cylinder produces a misfire on that cylinder only. Injectors can often be cleaned rather than replaced.

Compression. The expensive one. A burnt valve or a failed head gasket means that cylinder cannot compress properly. A compression test separates this from the other two, and it is worth doing before spending money on parts.

As a mechanic Albert Park drivers use for this, we test in that order, because the first two account for most cases and cost the least to check.

A misfiring cylinder pushes unburnt fuel into the exhaust. That fuel ignites inside the catalytic converter and overheats it. A converter is many times the cost of a set of plugs.

If the engine light is flashing rather than steady, that is the car telling you the misfire is bad enough to be damaging the converter right now.

2/208 Grange Rd, Flinders Park, about seven minutes from Albert Park. That makes us a mechanic Albert Park drivers can reach without crossing a major road.

Call (08) 8443 7900.

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