Thanks ND, Ernie and the rest of the 'hood

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I solved a problem (hopefully permanently) this weekend with all your help.

Background: I normally drive my car twice a week with about 500 miles running per month in total. However, April, May and June were bad months for me from a driving standpoint - I was out of the country for nearly 6 weeks. I left the car on the battery tender but it was lying unused for a long time.

So when I got back on Friday, I started up the car. To my delight it fired up with no issues. I went on a drive after filling the nearly dry tank with some fresh gas and there were no problems at all during the drive.

The next day, I went to meet a friend and about 10 minutes into the drive the check engine 5-8 light came on. My heart stopped beating for a couple seconds .

I pulled over to the side road and cycled the engine on and off to see if it was a bum light. No luck as the engine light stayed on. So I crept back slowly home using low revs and reached home safely. All the while I had visions of the crankshaft and pistons crashing into themselves.

There was nothing I could see in the repair manual or owners manual about this issue or perhaps I missed it. So I did the best possible thing and fired up fchat and quickly zeroed on a couple threads that looked useful. Using ND's documentation and Ernie's hints, I read the fault codes from the ECU (1212 - lambda something or the other). Funny thing is I missed the codes initially - I was looking at the ECU for the blinking light not realizing the blinking light was in the instrument panel .

Then I read ND's notes on cleaning up the electrical connectors and used a contact cleaner and some grease to clean and lubricate any electrical connection I could reach into the engine bay from the top. I also noticed that the plastic protective layer on one of the wires had peeled off - I could see the copper wire exposed. I wrapped it in electrical duct tape.

Having done all this, I reset the fault codes in the ECU and fired up the beast. Hooray - the blessed engine light got extinguished. I then went on a 20 mile drive driving cautiously at first and then using the revs. The light remained switched off.

Feeling that all is sweet and light in the world, I pulled back into the garage. I finally did something on my car and felt proud about (I know it is small but to a neophyte like me it was a big deal )

Thanks to the brothers for posting a wealth of info here. A note to newcomers - there is tons of data here - search for it instead of asking about it.

Also a note to myself: the strategy of driving the car hard and often is golden - stick to it.

 

Got another victory under my belt today. Replaced the deflating crappy, $*#$@#$*@# rear Stabilus struts with new ones.

- Got the parts from Rockauto - thanks to Dave Handa for the link. The new part is also a Stabilus product - am curious if this will fail in two year's time
- Followed the struts replacement procedure detailed by V Vassalo in one of the threads on fchat.

To illustrate my level of competence (the shallows depths of it) - what took 10 minutes for you guys took me 2 hours to complete. I was struggling with a 1/2" wrench and finally got frustrated enough to buy some metric wrenches.

It was easier going after that. I kept getting backs spasms thanks to the contortioning required to get at the lower nut. That delayed me a bit too.

What cost me a lot of time was that some moron - dunno if it was the prev owner or his mechanic - used blue loctite on two of the nuts. It was a pain getting damn nuts off. I used some WD40 to loosen it and then a lot of elbow grease to get the damn thing to come off Even I know that you shouldn't use loctite on any maintenance part. Dumbass.

Oh Well - All's well that ends well.

If it fails again I am going to investigate if I can add a prop rod somehow. Should be a fail-safe solution.

Thanks brothers for all the wonderful info to enable a neophyte like me to do some things in the car

 

You will definitely know it when you need it. Pop the rear trunk or the front hood and raise it. If it can stay up on its own then your struts are fine. If it starts to close on its own, your struts need to be fixed.

In my case, one of the original struts was OK and the other one was useless. The hood cannot stay up with a single functional strut. At least i have a functional spare. unfortunately there is no way to know which one is the errant strut till you remove it.

Procedure here: http://ferrarichat.com/forum/showthread.php?t=144345&highlight=strut