ford escort zx2 2000- knocking sound/ service engine soon light

[amnesiac84]

Well my car has only 63,000 and the lifters sound pretty bad, i use valvemedic on it and it stopped the noise on the drive home, when i started it again it's back and now it's constant.

What can i do?

Also the car has the service engine soon light on, what does this mean??
what do i have to do?

[dougand3]

Originally Posted by amnesiac84

Also the car has the service engine soon light on, what does this mean??
what do i have to do?

You can get the codes read free at Autozone, maybe others. It will show something like P0171, P0301, etc and give a description.

Here is a list of OBDII codes
http://www.obdii.com/codes.html

[frafreg]

I don't know what year Escort you have but mine is a 1990 and it has had a lifter noise since it had 26,000 miles on it. I had planned to replace it this summer but I got too busy fixing otehr things. Also, my car has OBD I so I purchased the Equus scanner which lets you reset the computer and see the error codes. you can also run some test on the relays and solonoids. I paid about $30 bucks for it. Auto Zone will scan your car for free. Make sure you write downthe error codes and post back here so someone can helpyou. Good luck!

Originally Posted by amnesiac84

Well my car has only 63,000 and the lifters sound pretty bad, i use valvemedic on it and it stopped the noise on the drive home, when i started it again it's back and now it's constant.

What can i do?

Also the car has the service engine soon light on, what does this mean??
what do i have to do?

[AzTumbleweed]

Is it possible it jumped time? I guess if a camshaft was off a tooth or two it might make some noise. Would also turn on the check engine light I'd think.

[amnesiac84]

i'll go check it out, we don't have autozone here, we have western auto and pepboys so i don't know if i can get it scanned for free