my car does that in 60°F garage. drain hose will do nothing.

 

Brought my car into service today and my SA said he had a 08 off the truck with only 2 miles with the issue.

 

Pure speculation here...

The RX-8 has cold shutdown procedures and is known to have startup problems if these procedures are not followed explicitly. Basically, what Mazda says to do is; when the car is started and isn't allowed to reach operating temperatures, you should rev the engine beyond 4000 RPM for 20 seconds before shutdown. This is mostly due to the rich gas mixture not being able to burn off when the car is only moved a short distance prior to shutdown. I've done this procedure religiously in the 3 years I've owned my RX-8 and never had a problem. However, others have not followed the procedure and had major problems; including flooding the engine, loss of power, engine chugging, black smoke, etc.

Again, not sure if this is even close to what's going on with the MINI but the symptoms sounded familiar in this post.

 

As an avid and current owner of an RX7 and knowing of issues with RX7s and RX8s this is a completely different and irrelevant situation.

RX7 and RX8 rotary engines are very prone to fouling, flooding, and losing compression if not allowed to warm up to a decent temperature before shutdown.

FWIW the oiling system on Rotary engines is waaaay overengineered and supportive of more than about 700 horsepower in stock form. Also, Rotary engines do not have cams, valves, timing chains/belts, or pistons for that matter. They are Wankles which Mazda spent millions engineering and developing during the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s. They have very little in common with piston recipricating engines.

 

4000rpm cold? no thanks.

 

the rotory and the piston engine only share the facts that they burn gas and are called engines. FWIW, 4k RPM in a rotory is a very low RPM indeed.

Matt

 

Last I knew the RX8 redlined at 9,000

 

I realize the differences between the engines...that was one of the major reasons I prefaced my post with "This is only speculation".

Take it for whatever you think it's worth. If nothing, so be it.

 

Hmmm, same pattern: Very short run (< 1 or 2 minutes), sit for hours, next start has horrible noise. It really seems to me that this extremely short run hours earlier significantly increases the chances of this happening...

 

that's the only way I can make it happen. But am I supposed to drive it around unnecessarily because I took the car out of the garage? This is absurd..

 

How about simply trying the RX-8 cold engine shutdown procedure. Don't rev as high, perhaps 2500 to 3000 RPM for 20 seconds prior to shutdown. Only when the engine isn't up to full operating temp. Can't hurt...

 

How about just putting in 0w30/40 as EventHorizon has suggested? Sounds a lot safer to me than reving the engine like that when it is not warmed up.

 

without a load is no problem. These aren't eggshells....

Matt

 

It just seems so disrespectful to the car ---- I wince as I picture poor Arthur's face as I force him to rev cold...

 

well at least a lot of us did, with old pushrod engines, and 4000 RPM was well past the torque peak, HP peak and close to a practical red-line. Now the little suckers soom to well over 7k (what would have grenaded a mid 60s V8, without carefull building). The key part is it's a no-load rev, that will pump oil at higher pressures.

Matt

 

Two things to consider

1. Does the oil filter have anti-drain engineering? I know most "over the counter" filters have it, some do it better than others.

2. Maybe we can raise oil pressure a few psi at idle? Does anyone have an aftermarket oil pressure guage installed? I've got a spare one from the rx7 maybe I'll install it sometime soon

 

I posted the following today in the Motoringfile thread...

Well I dropped off my Mini Monday (3/3/08) morning with Checkered Flag BMW here in Virginia Beach, VA. I picked it up today (3/4/08). They had it two days doing checks.
Their report states the following:
No unusual engine noises heard at this time. We listened to engine operation when cold & hot. After test drives, no unusual engine noises heard at this time. We heard only normal engine operation noise from the motor. We compared the vehicle with other R56’s, no problems found.
I feel that Checkered Flag did what they could at this point in time. At least I have a service report with them that states that I the customer felt I had something going on with motor noise/knocking at just under 6000 miles.
I’ll watch this thread and others. I’ll keep records on my experiences with my R56. I still love my car and have no intentions of looking to get rid of it.

 

A1-I can't speak to the filter itself... but I know there's a one way "none-return oil check valve" in the head itself (connected to the VANOS unit) to serve just that purpose. I know because mine was replace when they were troubleshooting... with no effect.

A2-That would seem to make some sense (an ECU tweek requiring higher pressure on start-up). It might at least make the noise go away quicker when it does occur. As far as the pressure that its running as stock, mine was measured to be withing factory spec during the warm-up and test drives (1.7-3 bar)

 

1000 Miles on the clock and mine started making the noise. It spent 12 hrs in a 50 degree garage when I started it up.

In person it sounds nasty. The kind of nasty that I felt when I screwed up a motorcycle engine wrenching on it years ago.

I'll ignore it for the time being.

 

SuperModsquad, sorry to see a fellow week 2er suffering from this.

 

about growth of NAM and the amount that the R56 may have contributed to it. While it was a very brief note and I"m not sure what point he was trying to make, it's only fair that I acknowledge that the estimate may be very high (heck, it might even be low) for the number of cars with problems. That said, every 1/10th of a percent of production would be about 250 cars a year.... And for volume manufacturing, faults that are in the 1/10% range or higher is really unacceptable... Whatever the true number is (and I really have no clue) one can be sure that it's much higher than MINI expected....

Matt

 

I got word from my SA today at work --- Mini says the rattle is caused by oil being aerated on the cam chain and they have a fix that's been working. I'm hoping to pick up my car tomorrow and find out the exact details; I wasn't able to talk in length about it while I was in a conference room....

 

That's encouraging! Please let us know if you get a technical detail from MINIusa (i.e., the Puma report details).

 

Bill, please keep us posted. Looks like there is light at the end of the tunnel (Hopefully)

 

As a soon-to-be owner, I'd like to believe this problem is an extremely low-prevalence event, but unfortunately I don't currently think that's the case. I agree with your position than even a few 1/10's of a percentage point would be unacceptable for a high-volume manufacturer, but I think it's probably worse than that. Consider this: We've only had a very small number of owner's come on this forum and state that BMW actually replaced their engine because of this problem (probably < 5 owners). Yet within that very tiny group, one of those owners had the problem reappear on the new engine. If this problem were truly limited to 0.1% of the production line (probability = 0.001), and it was truly random (i.e., not owner induced), then the probability that a given owner could have this problem on two different engines is 0.001x0.001 = 0.000001, or 1 in a million (literally!). Yet we've seen it happen within a tiny sample group of less than 5, suggesting that the prevalence of this problem is much greater than 0.1%. I've know enough about probability theory to understand that a freak occurrence of a low-probability event can indeed happen in a small sample group, but that explanation is less likely to be true than the alternative: this isn't a very low-prevalence problem.