My fairmont has recently in its travels found some gremlins, and they have come to my attention now and they need fixing, so if anyone could help with some advice, it would be much appreciated, problems are as follows:

1. Ticking noise when engine is warm, seems to be coming from the back of the engine bay, i have been told it could be something to do with lifters, and could also have to do with me using oil which is not thick enough

2. As i am driving, after a while the temperature guage goes into the orange zone, and the light comes on, however the engine wont be hot or overheating, and after a while it will reset its self and go back to just under the normal zone. and sometimes after a while it will do the same thing, and stay on.

3. the speedo flickers up and down and the gearbox kicks up and down gears, and slips into neutral and back into gear, also at night the dash lights will flicker on and off, which is interesting because they are all LED's and usually leds only dim or die when they are getting old, i have my suspisions this is something to do with an earth???

The hydraulic lash adjusters are a common problem with these falcons and I've gone through a few of them.. I think from memory they cost around 20-22 odd bucks each, you could pull the rocker cover off and press down on the rockers to find the dodgy ones. They should all feel pretty tight but the buggered ones should have some play in them.

If the guage is reading hot, how do you know it is not over heating? Does the radiator light come on at all?

When the dash lights go out, do all the dash lights go out? Switches, heater controls etc or just the instrument cluster?

1) ticking noise are old tired lifters----replace the noisy ones

2&3) Are a result from bodgy wiring....

Will do, thanks for the great advice, i had been told they were cheap to replace, and offered help to fix them, but as things usually are , that person was busy, but anyway thanks for the help on that, i will get around to it, as i have a more pressing matter at the moment, it has decided to go into limp home mode, or atleast jump in and out of it?

i think this may be something to do with an earth also, would you be able to tell me where the earth's are located in the dash?



i think this has something to do with earth, for both of these problems, i will be checking that over the weekend, pulling dash surround ect. off,

i am lead to beleive that it isnt over heating because i have stopped once or twice to check it, and neither the coolant res cap or the res itself are too hot to touch, or the rocker cover or the hose leading to the thermostat, now im not sure if this is correct but i am assuming this is so.

i have also been told that an earth playing up could cause this.

Thanks for the great advice guys, im a bit lost when it comes to cars with computers controlling everything.... much much different to carbies in rotaries and 28 chev's

hey sorry for the late response just saw the post.

With the heat problem make sure you check your drive belt.

I just cooked a motor in a commodore due to not checking.

the temp gauge was doing the same thing.

it would go up to hot and then after 20-30sec go back down to normal.

it ended up being that the belt was not tight enough and the water pump would stop spinning then eventually it would get going again and all good.

in the end the pump stopped for about 3-4mins i did not really worry until the motor started to play up and then just stalled and would not start again.

Thanks

To anyone who has had the same problems,

took the fairmont to an auto elec, i ended up having to take it back twice because the first time they could not fault it and wanted me to drive it more but once i took it back again, the guy told me he moved around some wiring under my gas mixer, and that may have caused the problem.
but this has fixed my speedo flickering and gearbox mucking around, and has also fixed the thermo fans turning on ( my thoughts is some dodgy wireing causeing an earth to mess around)

anyway, on the overheating side of things i changed my coolant temperature sensor the other day, and now it all works fine, if not better than before.

the ticking noise is a lifter, i just have not been around to fixing that problem...

thanks to all that replied