| 2012 Toyota Camry |
| 92547 miles |
| 2.5L Engine |
| U660E Transaxle |
|
Complaint: "Noise when turning and accelerating |
As I began doing rudimentary work on cars for Dad when I was a young teenager, I already observed him enough to absorb the fact that there was a heck of a lot more to fixing cars than changing parts, and we all know too many troubleshooters reach dead ends for lack of experience. The experience we gain with each new problem is as valuable as our box of tools, and the most comforting thing any prospective customer can hear us say when a strange problem develops is “I’ve seen this before…” Then there are times when we exhaust every resource and troubleshooting trick and hit a dead end, after which we have to back up and re-think the problem.
Once a friend of mine who has been in this business just about as long as I have was working on a Merkur Scorpio in the next service bay and he was totally confounded because the engine had everything it needed in the way of compression, spark, clean spark plugs, good fuel delivery and quality, and proper timing, yet it still wouldn’t start. He had hit a dead end and asked my opinion, and somewhere out of the bygone mental drawers full of “Try This” files I had stored, I retrieved the answer he needed, and it wouldn’t cost a dime to give it a shot.
“Take three of the spark plugs out and try to start it that way.” He was incredulous at my suggestion, and his incredulity intensified when the engine started, blowing compression out of those empty spark plug holes like a machine gun.
“What the heck does THAT mean?” he practically shouted.
“The exhaust is stopped up,” I told him. Oddly, I didn’t remember where I had seen that but I had fixed a lot of cars and I had certainly seen it a couple of times before. It just popped into my head that day.
I do remember once back in 1981when I had to troubleshoot a 1972 LTD I was driving that had clogged the exhaust during a moment of heavy acceleration – and that one was a vehicle that preceded the days of catalytic converters, but it happened anyway. I had seen clogged cats on newer model cars, but a clogged exhaust on a vehicle with no cat kind of blew my mind. I hit a dead end on that one too, for about a hour. It turned out that the laminated inside layer of the exhaust pipes had failed. Exhaust pipes aren’t made that way today. But on both sides in the horizontal area of the exhaust right below the driver’s feet, the inside layer of exhaust pipe laminate had been compromised somehow, caught the intense exhaust stream flow, and that pressure had blown them up like a balloon inside the pipes while leaving the outer visible layer undisturbed. It was the weirdest thing ever, and I haven’t seen it since. In half a breath of time when I heavy-footed the accelerator, I went from full power to an engine that was struggling to exhale, and it took me over an hour to figure out what happened when I got it to the shop. Those pipes looked rather normal on the outside except that the pipes were kind of flattened on the bottom where they had scrubbed pavement and railroad tracks over the years. But hacksaw surgery revealed the inside ballooning. I welded in some replacement sections of pipe and fixed that one.
Power Issues
Before sharing the Camry story, it would serve well to visit an issue we dealt with on a 2006 Silverado that felt like a dead end for a while. This one has 116,000 plus on the odometer and is blessed with a 4.8L. The truck was purchased by our college maintenance director as a used vehicle about a year ago and he drives the truck himself. When he came to us with a low power complaint, I did more than take it with a grain of salt, because he’s pretty perceptive. That being said, the 4.8L isn’t a powerhouse to begin with, and not having driven the truck regularly, it was somewhat difficult to say even after his demonstration test drive that the low power issue wasn’t kind of built in. But it did have an intermittent miss at idle that more or less stayed with cylinder number four on the scan tool misfire monitor screen, and that miss wasn’t spark plug, coil, or injector related. We moved coils and plugs around to verify, and then flow tested all the injectors with the OTC tester to find that they all dropped about 14 psi during a half-second pintle opening. It’s interesting to note that there were no misfire codes set, but the misfire monitor kept picking up misfires on cylinder four and sometimes on cylinder three.
Even then, it was somewhat difficult to put our finger on what seemed like a “not like it used to be” complaint. We removed both O2 sensors at the same time, screwed our fittings in, and checked the exhaust backpressure in front of the cats with hosed gauges. There was NO backpressure – less than 2 psi is typically acceptable, and we didn’t even have a pound. We shot the pipes in front of and behind each converter for temperature with the FLIR camera, but that’s kind of not-too-truthful when the cats are so near the manifold, and so that test was inconclusive. The fuel pressure while driving –even during the somewhat anemic acceleration remained steady at 61 psi as measured while in the wind. he fuel trims were mildly out of balance, and there was about 7 degrees of knock sensor related spark retard according to the scan tool screen, but that wasn’t the smoking gun we were hoping to find. The MAF was reading as we would have expected, and I even did a volumetric efficiency calculation, which can be troublesome and misleading at times, but it was another piece of data.
We did a compression test, both static, running, and running-snap, and found that #4 cylinder only had half the compression that all the other cylinders had during the snap test. This one obviously had issues with the valve train.
To seal the deal, one of my more noise-attentive and engine-experienced students had mentioned that he was hearing some mild valve train activity under the valve cover on bank 2 and so we pulled that valve cover and started the engine to let it run on four cylinders. We found a bit of click and clack on the exhaust rocker for number four, and so we removed that rocker arm and did a lobe lift measurement with the dial indicator – the exhaust lift should be .274 inch on this one and we got .243. This engine would, at the very least, need a camshaft, which, when the heads were removed and reworked and the parts were all charged out, would cost more than a good used replacement engine, especially since my department was doing the job for the college and there was no labor figured in. LKQ sent us a 5.3L for a very good price and that Silverado ran like a rocket sled on rails with the upgrade.
The Totally Crazy Camry Deal
This 2012 Camry is driven by the spouse of a colleague of mine, and it came to us with the complaint of a noise when turning and accelerating on the driver’s side, but it was one of those noises you couldn’t duplicate unless you drove the car just the right way. When we finally got that combination right, it we could get it every time, and while the noise had the characteristics of a CV axle with dimpled races, it seemed to me that there were too many events, or “clicks” for it to be a CV axle, and it kind of sounded like something making contact with the rotor’s sheet metal backing plate.
A visual inspection revealed nothing at all – and we looked it over really well. The CV axle boots were in good shape, not even leaking grease, and there were no signature marks anywhere. We connected the Chassis Ear® with the hard-wired mikes and drove it again – and it sounded even more like something tapping against a piece of tin instead of a CV axle. We ran out of time that day and I told the customer to bring the car back the next day.
Instead, the customer’s spouse took the Camry to the Toyota dealer and they matter-of-factly condemned the CV axle and said it’d be $800 parts and labor to replace it… that was a non-starter for the customer and so the car came back to us. I decided to obtain a CV axle from the parts store, pop it in there and put this thing to rest, doggedly clinging to my conviction that if the outboard CV boot wasn’t busted and the car had only 92k on the clock, how could it be a CV axle? If it turned out NOT to be the CV axle, at least we’d have eliminated that as a possible source of the noise, and it wouldn’t cost much to do that. So I called my favorite parts supplier. That’s where things got really interesting, because we ran into one dead end after another.
“We Can’t Get One”
In my forty years of working in the automotive industry, I’ve known a LOT of parts people, and one of the best parts men I ever worked with was a man I’ll call James C., and that man took a tremendous amount of pleasure in being the go-to guy for parts. Whatever part you wanted, he’d move heaven and earth to find it – and that was before the days of the Internet. I have not worked with a parts man with such a commitment to excellence before or since. In recent years (like the past fifteen), I’ve worked with quite a few parts counter people who are fairly prone to just tell me to look somewhere else for the part I need – which is a rather annoying dead end.
That being said, I never expected what happened this time. The first thing I was told was that there was a part number and a price ($70) in the system, but no CV axle for a 2012 Camry was available and there might not ever be, except from the dealer. I asked if the parts store could check with other parts stores in town, and the same answer came from those other vendors.
At this point, I called a guy I’ve dealt with off and on for my entire career, and he found one in Kentucky. When that one arrived, it wouldn’t fit – the hub on the 2012 Camry has 26 splines and the outer joint on the one they sent had 30 splines. The same supplier figured that part must have been “boxed wrong” (who hasn’t heard that about a thousand times?), and another one was ordered from a warehouse somewhere out on the west coast. We had to wait four days for that one, but it was exactly the same as the first wrong one.
That’s when my regular supplier shifted into a different gear and managed to find me another one somewhere else, and we ordered that one, only to find out that it was a 30 spliner too. This may have been why the parts pipeline was clogged the first time I tried to order one. I found one on Amazon for a really good price, and so we ordered that one. It looked really good but still had 30 splines.
This was a dead end of the first magnitude and it was time to re-think the situation.
It was at this point that I figured I’d change out the hub assembly if need be to make situation work, so I asked my parts supplier to get me a hub, and was told on that phone call that one wasn’t available. So I called Toyota, got the part number for a hub that fit a 2012 Camry, and called the parts store back to give them the Toyota part number, which crossed to a Dorman part number. I went online myself to check out that Dorman part number and found that it fits a 2004-2009 Camry. So I had the parts store get me that hub and a CV axle for a 2009 Camry – and I got a CV axle with 26 splines – and it fit. And the noise was gone.
After the smoke cleared and the car left, I disassembled that CV joint and found that the CV joint had been assembled with not enough lube and that there were indeed wear dimples on the drive side of the tracks. Further, that CV joint has eight balls and tracks instead of the standard six, which explains why the cadence of the clicking was faster than what I’ve been accustomed to hearing over the years. So the grease misplacement negated the fact that the boot wasn’t compromised (which usually precedes CV joint wear) and two more balls and tracks had changed the click cadence.
There is something pretty satisfying about finally circumventing a dead end and finding your way home. R.W.M.
