ok. So i have a 95 or a 97 dodge neon. I'm not quite sure since it was made into a 2nd rate race car before i bought it. The engine is a 97 and the body is a 95 i think.
Any way when i bought the car it was overheating.. badly so i tried everything to fix it before i resorted to the fixing the headgasket myself. (hard to do)

in the process of fixing the headgasket my friends dad decided to see if the timing was off and he bent all the valves.

so i bought a new cylinder head and put that on.

only to find out that the old one was ported and polished..... i miss that cylinder head.

well anyway we put it all back together and it ran good/fair for a few months.. then it started loosing power in acceleration.. so i checked it out and white smoke comes out the tail pipe so its the piston rings.

i'm not too worried about that at the moment. but now there is a loud knocking sound when it car runs.

i've talked to a few places and they said that it was a pushrod.. (NEONS DONT HAVE PUSHRODS IDIOTS) so i i talked to a mechanic that owned a neon and he said maybe a collapsed lifter. i'm not sure though it's always made a clicking/knocking sound but not this loud.

its really loud. it sets off car alarms...
and the car stopped running for a while so i took it apart half way and gave up.. haha.

now today i put it back together and it ran fine. but the knocking/ clicking is still really bad.
and the acceleration is really ****ty. but it's drivable.

i'm not sure what the problem is. and i'd like to get some opinions before i get a diagnostic on it.

i'm a young chick and i know men will try to tell me theres like a million things wrong with it which there isn't

i also would like to know if it is dangerous to drive in this condition.

thanks for your help. =]

 

if you have a loud knocking sound then there are usually 3 things it could be...
1: bad crankshaft main bearing
2: bad or spun piston rod bearing
3: piston slap

main bearings and rod bearings both come into the same problems...to fix, you will need to get new bearings, new crank or get the crank polished (if its really bad(sounds like it is)), if its a rod bearing then you will probally have to get a new rod as well.....with all this, it will probally be easier to just get a new motor..

piston slap, if that what it is then its usually caused by the piston rings or a bad wrist pin...if the slap is really bad then it may have beat up the cylinder wall a bit and would need to get honed out to try a fix the problem

you can drive the car with having any of these problem, but it just isnt good for the motor....if you plan on getting a new motor, then i would say to just drive it til it blows up...but thats just me

personally, i would suggest a spun rod bearing if its really really loud...

while the car is running, disconnect each fuel injector...1 by 1..if the noise gets alot quieter with one of the injectors unpluged, then thats the cylined with the problem

hope this helps ya

 

welcome to the forum, im gogin to take a wild guess and assume you are a girl?
i dont think we have any girls in the 1st gen section

 

lol, yes shes a girl, she said so in her post

welcome to the forum Channelle, i see your from glendale, its a pretty nice place, been there a couple of times

if you miss your ported head, your in luck, theres 2 people close to you that can do some of the best work to a neon cylinder that has been seen

Look for AMM or Eddie Fierro, both live in pheonix, i believe Eddie is only on the org, but AMM is on here every once in a while, his street strip port jobs start at 550, and since your that close shipping wouldnt be an issue. PM me and i can send you a link to photos of his work and flow numbers

as far as the noises, spud sounds right on the money, probably going to be a spun rod bearing if its as loud as it sounds like it is

my truck spun a rod bearing once, and it was unbearable, could hear it clearly even over my open exhaust

 

Is it a knocking sound or a ticking sound???
Can you tell if its coming from the top or bottom???