Takes deep breath...........
That's very interesting about the hego sensor and the poor performance.

As some of you may know, my

has had the poor performance and irratic/lumpy idle issue since it was 600 miles old.

I took it back to Bristol St West Brom (where I bought it from) five times for them to investigate but they always gave it me back saying it was a character of the car

,
not listening to my plees that the same 1.25 Zetec was blowing me away each morning on the way to work or that I had driven ST_ONE's and knew what a proper ST should be like.

Anyway they got a technical specialist

to have the car for a day and he told me it was normal as well! Tosser

.
I informed him that he was inexperienced

and that he should have driven the equivelant car back to back with mine before he came to that conclusion!

Anyway I gave up, got depressed and started planning to get rid of it as I had convinced myself that it was me being fussy and that they were right.

Then one morning while I was sitting in the car before I went into work, having a fag (a cigarette not a man

) the systems failure lamp came on (the asterix with a cog around it) and the EML (engine warning lamp) and the cluster was saying "major systems failure - drive to dealer" and also for the previous few weeks it had been gradually getting worse and was stinking of rotten eggs. But when I got back in after work it had gone off.

I booked the car in at Heartlands Ford Erdington because 1 - I wasn't going to waste my time with Bristol St again and 2 - They are situated right at the back of the Jaguar plant so I wouldn't have to drive a KA or a 1.25 LX again!!

I picked the car up and quess what - yep - they told me they couldn't find anything the matter with it
BUT he did say that the PCM (Engine ECU) had gone out of sync and that he had re-calibrated it for me, road tested it and that it did feel a bit better. I explained the history of the problem to him and he told me not to worry, if I'm not happy bring it back and they'll investigate.
My god he was right

, for the next three days it was running like a dream, fast as f**k and really smooth & quiet.

ST_ONE will tell you I was like a dog with two dicks!!

Then on the way home from work on the Thursday it clicked back into mongol mode again and my happiness fell out of my back passage

Then on the Friday (two weeks ago) on the way home from work the EML came on again and it really was struggling to run (coughing and stinking like a mental case) so I thought, I'm not doing anything, I'm phoning the AA out while the lamp's on.
The AA man came out and read the fault codes off for me, they were
P0132 - High Voltage No.1 Hego Sensor
P01132 - Air/Fuel Mixture fault.
"Your cat sensor's knackered", he said.

So I phoned Heartlands on the Saturday morning and they got me booked in for the Monday (good service or what!) I got a call at lunch time Monday telling me the Hego sensor had gone but he'd have to order it in as there were none in the country so I could pick my car up and they would call me when the part arrives for me to have it fitted.
So the car went in yesterday to have the HEGO sensor fitted and he told me that he re-calibrated the PCM again (you have to apparently, when you've changed an engine component) then took it on a road test.
He then told me that during the road test, he wasn't happy with the bad smell coming from the exhaust (eggs) or the idle lumpyness or the throttle response so he took it back into the workshop and did a test on the
catalyst and found that it
had collapsed internally and was strangling the engine!!

He said that the fault has probably been there since new but the HEGO sensor would always have been trying to correct the running of the engine to compensate for it, which has over worked it and caused it to give up the ghost and pack up!!
So to finish off, he's ordered a new cat for me and will call me when it's in so he can fit it for me.
He has also assured me that if it's still not right after that then they will do some serious investigation for me (which could include stripping the engine down) but I won't let them get that far, I shall reject the car then because I'll have all the evidence I'll need.
Sorry to rant on but this problem had bugged me for agaes and I needed to get it off my chest.

So the morale of the story is........
Never give up!!

Thank you very much
