Maybe chemicals in the air/water vapor? Acid rain. I once had all the bronze in my boat go from greenish to nearly black between visits - maybe two weeks - including fittings in the cabin.

 

Bill:

Youhad a lot of metal cutting, grinding, welding in your driveway for a while there...yes?

 

Yeah, doing a large steel gate frame and 100 feet of steel railing.

 

AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, My eyes....


The GT spent a year outside, covered, when the dead GTS was non-op in the garage. It only rained 2-3 times but I made sure to pull the cover post-rain and drive it around to air out the engine compartment. Even so, the plating is not as bright as it was in May '09. It is, after all, a sacrificial coating, of sorts.

 

Rob: I hope the pictures didn't stress you out too much. Maybe just bump up your OCD meds for a few days until it passes. jk

 

In person that GT was funky, bolts that I never had seen corroded before were sort of fuzzy, and the worry was the salt mist went places not easy to inspect and that is where the worst would be.

I think something interesting was going on with that ignition wire. Maybe the spark zap was sending fumes up the inside of the insulation?

First image didn't load for some reason.

 

So..I was at Bills again today..and this is how im gonna sum this up.

1) Bill has had a LOT of construction at his house lately, and a LOT of metal work has been done on site.

2) I get about 10x more rain than bill does. My 928 sits outside all the time. In the last WEEK weve gotten..9.48" of rain, the week before that, 12.3". Humidity is 100% all the time, except a few hours when its in down to maybe 75% mid-day, on a GOOD day.

3) Ive had friends with cars in SanFran, near construction areas, where everything exposed on the car looked like it had salt spray on it constantly.


Bill's car picked up a ton of construction 'dust'...the kind of dust and grime in a machine shop..you never want it on your stuff and get wet/damp/moist/sit.

His did.

 

OK, so here we are less than 90 days later. Car stored in doors. Driven about 1K miles. I developed an irregular miss only on warm idle starting in the last week. With the miss, my wideband would go lean...so I thought ignition issue again. Seemed to run fine otherwise.

This is from the same side as earlier problem. This cap and coil wire were brand new 90 days ago. The spark plug connections looked fine but the coil connection on the cap looked like this! The coil end of the wire was fine.

So, I just now replaced the cap and all ignition wires. Strange....busted and charcoal like appearance.

 

I would take a very close look at the connection in the cap. I have seen a very small gap there (well, in analogous systems) cause problems like this. In any case, dig further this is very interesting.

 

wasn't this a new cap and coil wire????

 

Yes, NEW 90 days ago. The wire end came apart with 1/2 remaining in the distributor cap. There was black carbon-like soot in there. So, somehow the wire connector broke and arc'd. I cleaned out the distributor cap and that half of the connection looks fine. Oh, well. New factory cap and a complete new Beru wire set installed today. Car is running great, but my WB O2 is still indicating on the lean side. I guess I'll recalibrate it.