MOT is coming up in July, and i have a quite bad smokey problem!
It's on my 1985 2.5NA diesel. I get plumes of white smoke (not water vapour) but it only comes when the engine is cold - a mile down the road and it runs just fine...
a little research on google tells me it's unburned fuel - surely it'd continue when hot too? unless it's valves not seating properly until the block has expanded to fill the gaps?

also, I seem to remember reading somewhere that if a vehicle is past a certain age, the garage would only do a visual check for emissions on the MOT rather than the proper poke the stick up the exhaust job... thing is, if they do that, all they'll see is a workshop full of smoke!!

any ideas?!

They will run it until hot, by which time the smoke will clear. Could be leaking valve stem seals, allowing oil to seep past them, into the cylinder and is burnt off when started up.I think its only a visual check for excessive smoke.

sounds promising... perhaps a bit of that 'engine oil stop-leak' might help in the short term? it's supposed to refresh dried up hard seals... it's going to have a full strip down and rebuild in the next few months anyway...

cheers for the quick reply!

That stuff worked on a '92 peugeot 205 TD quite a few years back. It stopped the crank seal leaking for about 6 months.

i heard it's only a quick fix as it'll turn seals to black goo if left too long... cheers for the help

the fuel distributor pump may be a little retarded due to timing chains stretched

mine used to create tonnes of white smoke and stank like kerosene/ parraffin all i did was advance the pump by 2 degrees and she runs pretty much clear now and sounds a lot healthier too