Shmokin...

[thermidorthelobster]

This is a question about a Rover, not a Freelander, but it's a Rover 220SDI with the 2l L-series diesel as seen in the early Freebies.  So I'm hoping somebody will be able to help.  Sorry for hijacking your forum.

My wife has a 1997 Rover 220SDI with only 48K miles on the clock.  She's had it about a year.  Like most 220s it's quite fun to drive - plenty of torque so if you put your foot down, it tends to go quite nicely.

I drove it earlier and went to burn a Mondeo off the lights (childish and pointless, but if you drive a Disco TD5 you need all the speed thrills you can get).  Said Mondeo then disappeared in a big cloud of black smoke.  I'm quite familiar with a puff of smoke now and then from any diesel, but this was of James Bond smoke-screen proportions.  It would have appeared on satellite images.  Even Red Adair would have thought it was excessive.

My wife has a fairly relaxed driving style, so part of this will be it coking up from never being revved very highly.  But even so, I've noticed in the past it seems to smoke more than you'd expect from a lowish-mileage engine, although it passed its last emissions test first time (after I burned it down the dual carriageway on the way to the test centre).  The smoke comes when you rev it higher than normal, and it's black.  The car also tends to whiff a bit when you first start it up.

Any suggestions as to what I should start worrying about?  Is there something obvious and simple I can or should do?

Thanks,
David

[muddyweb]

Might be worth running some injector cleaner through it.

Neil (Thrasher) put some engine treatment in Piglet too, which cleaned up the inlet manifolds, etc.  (but I can't remember the name)

[Range Rover Blues]

I've an ageing Cavalier LSD with the 17DR engine and even without a turbo it does the same, when ever you sit at the lights for a while then give it some as you set off it smokes.  At idle the engine runs a lot of exhaust recirculation so you'll find a lot of soot in your intake plenum, this is normal.  At idle the cylinder temp falls slightly and fuel isn't burned properly making things worse (relatively speaking) so this soot builds up untill you open the throttle (though all but the newest diesels don't have one really) and the engine blows itself clear.
In short I wouldn't worry, if the emissions test is ok then it's working ok, if the fuel economy is where you'd expect it then that's that.  There are aftermarket diesel cleaners you can get and they make a small difference but basically a modern (ish) turbo-diesel will smoke, they over-fuel to get the performance and are expected to have worse emissions than a NA diesel like mine.
I would recomend you have the injectors serviced as per the service book though!