Things were going so well, until things didn't.
On the drive back home (see above). This happened
Gave it the wellies a bit on a short stretch and as soon as came-off-the-gas, the car choked and stalled. Lost all power. Coasted to a stop, started and it went into a lumpy reluctant idle. Gave it gas and it just wanted to stall. The country road was narrow and with no shoulder. So, here we are stranded in the road. Sucks.
It seemed symptomatic of a big air leak. Like a charge hose came off a turbo. It was hard to tell, but a visual inspection on the road didn't reveal anything.
After getting the car home on a trailer, eventually discovered this using an endoscope camera:
What you see there is an acorn wedged into the butterfly flap of the throttle body.
AN ACORN !!??
Well, that explained a lot.
Getting it out meant getting it into service position - bah.
With the throttle body removed...
Yup, two more in the intake.
Extracted all the acorns, back together and all is ok.
I'm having a hard job explaining how those got in there. All I can think may have happened is that a rodent stored a few acorns in one of the intercoolers while I had the car disassembled. And then, under pressure/vacuum they got sucked into the manifold through the throttle body when WOT. Kinda made me want to go on a rodent hunting revenge mission.
Also explains what I thought was a lifter tick. Nope, just acorns bouncing around in the intake manifold.
(acorns gone, so has the tick). heh.
Amazing.
So, lesson learned. Must get cats.
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