Steve,

My van performed for a while exactly as you describe - and ultimately it
burned a hole in a piston and strewed metal completely through the
engine. Resulted in a complete rebuild.

You need a compression check pronto. If your mechanic is competent, he
can tell if you have intake valve or exhaust valve or ring problems.
It's not likely you have a stuck valve. Mine sure wasn't.  I recall
distinctly that for a while, every time I would drive around a clover
leaf on or off ramp on a highway, I would get this big puff of smoke.
Happened when starting the engine, the after going around those sweeping
curves where there was a steady centrifugal load. After my engine
failure, and the engine was torn down, I saw how the cylinder barrel was
scored. I suspect there had been some piston/cylinder damage already -
like a broken ring or rings and scoring of cylinder wall allowing the
oil to escape as the engine underwent centrifugal loading slinging a
heavy oil load through the damaged area and out through the exhaust as
blue-white smoke.

Just my experience.

John Rodgers
88 GL Driver

Steve Young wrote:
> Hi List,
>
> I'm having a weird problem with my westie. It has 1.9 wb engine that until January was running well. It was parked up for about 6 weeks until a bad ecu was diagnosed and replaced. Since then under a bit of load it will suddenly throw out a plume of smoke out of the exhaust, a very large and embarassing plume of smoke. It's done this twice in the past six months that I've noticed. Today when it happened I noticed a slight loss of power and glanced in the rearview mirror. I parked the van and started it up again after a few hours it smoked and power was uneven under throttle for a few minutes then righted itself. The engine sounds fine. I took it to a mechanic after the first time it happened and he suspected a stuck valve. That said the engine sounds fine even when disgorging lots of burnt oil. No rattles, or backfires.
>
> One potentially common factor is that the first time it happened was shortly after an oil change. Yesterday I noticed it was near low and threw in a litre of oil. Could too much oil cause these symptoms? Other factors I'm considering are valves, rings and ECU.
>
> Any ideas and advice appreciated.
>
> Steve
>
> P.S. engine is a VW rebuild of unknown age, van has 360,000 Km
>
>
>