gday guys,
i have a burning smell coming from underneath the bonnet. after i drive it, wen i park and step out i can always smell a burnt smell. not sure what it might be. gonna start looking into it but thought id drop a thread to see if anyone had any ideas on what it could be.
cheers
=)

Me too! I did the timing belt a while back, took rocker covers off for a look, possibly now have an oil leak getting on the rear exhaust. Noticed some blue smoke too, visible at night with a torch, but not in the daytime. I must get new gaskets and redo the covers, bummer! Won't really know until I take the intake off. This might be your problem too, any smoke?

depends on how you driving, could be clutch or brakes. but its likley as said to be oil leaking onto a hot part of the engine.
if you oil is bad enough, it may just be the actual oil that you can smell.
also, check the outer cv boots, because when one of mine split, grease got onto the caliper and made lots of smoke and smell. you can normall see if you have a split boot by feeling the inside of the wheel for grease.

yea ill have a look for oil dripping around. that could be it.
i havent checked the oil levels in a while. if im losing oil then it should show up there. i was planning on doing a service sometime this wkend. ill check the cv boots but i dun think it's them.
i was driving to the airport this morning and it was freezing out so i was blowing a fair bit of smoke out the back. it was worrying to see actually. i duno if it's the cold engine but there was a shyt load of smoke. i dun notice that kinda smoke wen the engine heats up tho.

i just gave the engine a rev with a torch. cant see any smoke. the engine isnt 100% cold tho, so maybe the smoke is a symptom of the cold.

what you saw was most likely steam, every car does it on a cold morning with a cold motor

Have u looked underneath for any damp areas? Auto or manual?

its an auto.
ill try and get a good look today or tmw. other than around the engine block, is there anywhere else i should be looking?

how much is a normal amount of steam then? or is that hard to quantify. because there seems like a lot of it. should i be worried?

if there is alot of condensation in your exhaust pipe there will be alot more steam, once all the steam is evapourated, it will stop steaming, this only happens once the exhaust is hot, so under light load it should take about 10 mins top, but it also depends how cold it is outside.

A burnt smell with blue smoke appearing when you lift the bonnet is oil on the exhaust, white smoke out the back is just water vapour. Two different things altogether. My blue smoke from the engine bay went away all by itself, must have been oil that leaked out when I had the rocket covers off. I now have 2 spare rocker cover gaskets, bought this morning, that I don't need. Good for future use though. lol

ok
i had a look around the engine today and there is clearly oil around the back of the engine. there seems to be quite a fair bit of it. im inclined to think that oil is escaping somehow but the level of the oil seems quite fine even after a few wks or so. i don't kno if it's leaking or there was just a bit of oil that ran down there one day and is slowly burning away. i figured that i could just use some degreaser and clean it up and see if the oil returns.
what do u guys think?

That'd be the best way to check. Oil does hang around for a long time when it's only getting hot, rather than actually burning.