Well I left my office yesterday to head towards Atlanta for the ATL H-T meet, and as soon as I hit the road, I started to feel what I thought was the clutch slipping when engaging gears. I started getting a little nervous but I headed on down to Jackson MS where I was visiting some friends, and by the time I got there it was worse, and also the engine is idling very low and rough. So I have decided to just head back home tomorrow.

However I'm thinking it's not my clutch slipping. Here are the symptoms:

- When accelerating, the engine feels very rough
- When driving, I feel a "jerking" or "chattering" or perhaps a vibration feeling
- During this "jerking" feeling, the tach needle does NOT fluctuate at all (which means it's probably not the clutch slipping).
- The engine is idling very low and rough, sometimes below 500 rpm and it has died on me twice.
- Gas mileage seems normal, 200+ miles on 1/2 tank of gas, which means it's probably not missing real bad
- The vibration feeling sometimes happens under load, which I thought could be an axle, but that doesn't explain the very low, rough idle.

I popped the hood awhlie ago and it looks like my distributor timing may be off, which could explain the low, rough idle and the rough acceleration. However I won't be able to tell until I get home (3 hrs of driving) and can put my timing light on it.

Or perhaps it could be a plug wire, dist. cap or rotor? I think I have about 100K miles on my wires, cap, and rotor. I'm thinking I should change those out.

My clutch and flywheel (Clutchmasters) do have about 90K miles of 99% normal driving, but still I don't think that's the problem.

If anyone has any insight I would appreciate it. At this point I just want to make it home w/o getting stranded and having to get it towed AGAIN.

 

man i dont really know whatsgoin on wiht ur car but do u live in memphis and on memphisracingscene.com????


bump for u anyway

 

yeah man you should know me I post in AJ all the time.

 

I had very similar problems with my db8. I had a act stage1 clutch and clutchmasters flywheel with only around 16,ooo miles. I though for sure my timming was off or maybe I needed a new car and plugs. I figured might as well open the tranny to see if that was the problem. Sure enough I had a bad spring plate on my act clutch. so it wasn't grabbing. I swapped in a new one and all of my problems went away. That is just what happend to me. You never know, sometimes more then one thing can fail. If you were up here I would throw it on a lift and check the tranny for you!

 

man I so wish I had access to a lift, cuz I hate pulling the tranny using jackstands.

When you had your problem, did the engine idle very low and rough?

If it were slipping, the tach needle should fluctuate but mine does not.

 

anyone else?

 

I would check all of the tune up parts. SP, wires, filters verything and also check the timing. Hace you check the cap and rotor to make sure its not burned out or has build up on the cap and rotor?

 

Well I made it back home this afternoon. The wierd thing is that about an hour away my car started feeling normal. I get to my exit and it still feels normal. Go down the street some and it's still fine, car is idling fine, accelerating fine. But then I get down the street further and it starts doing the same symptoms again.

So I got home and checked the timing, it's fine. I checked the plug wire resistance and it's fine, and I removed the cap to inspect it and the rotor, and they look fine for having 100K miles of use on them.

So then I noticed my number 3 plug wire, and I took the spark plugs out and all look fine except #3 which looks like it has some corrosion on top. The bottom portion looks normal just worn. Now when I pulled that #3 plug wire out, I noticed some drops of water around the top of the spark plug tube. I did pressure wash my engine last week, and while the plug wire cover was in place, perhaps some moisture got down in there? Here's a pic of the plug wires and plugs:





Perhaps maybe some moisture got down in the #3 plug tube and is interrupting or inhibiting the flow of current or something?

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by PatrickGSR94 &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">Perhaps maybe some moisture got down in the #3 plug tube and is interrupting or inhibiting the flow of current or something?</TD></TR></TABLE>

I'm inclined to agree. Plug #3 seems to be the smoking gun.

 

i think i had the same problem i changed the plug wires and it ran fine damn neuspeed

 

Well I guess I fixed it... seems to run okay now, I guess the moisture just dried out. I'll probably change out the plugs tomorrow anyway.

so yeah, I ditched the Atlanta H-T meet and came home because of some damn moisture on my plugs, and my friends I was staying with Friday and today didn't have any tools

 

Man, its weird that you had this problem because this is the exact problem that i am having and im really stressing out about it....i think im gonna check my wires tomorrow

 

Same thing happen to my turbo'd GSR motor a while back. Cleaned the engine, went on vacation , came back and it drove exactly how you described. it got to the point that i couldnt even drive it because the bogging, stalling, etc was so bad. turned out to be a sparkplug/wire that had been saturated by water. swapped out the plugs and everything was fine again, you might wanna change youre wires too tho.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by PatrickGSR94 &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">man I so wish I had access to a lift, cuz I hate pulling the tranny using jackstands.

When you had your problem, did the engine idle very low and rough?

If it were slipping, the tach needle should fluctuate but mine does not.</TD></TR></TABLE>

I had symptoms like yours but on mine the tach needle DID fluctuat! I am glad to see you got the problem solved.

 

Same problem, cleaned the motor up and car was bogging for a couple days because water got on the plugs/wires. Dried everything and the problem is fixed.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by TRE_ &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">swapped out the plugs and everything was fine again, you might wanna change youre wires too tho. </TD></TR></TABLE>

yeah I'll probably change all that soon, cap, rotor, wires, etc. They have 97K miles on them I checked last night.

 

yeah it was probably the water on your plug. Same thing happened to me after i caleaned my engine bay...my dumbass forgot to cover the distributor along with my altenator and my plug cover had a crack in it...got water in all 4 cylinders. ahahaha yeah it was a big mess..needed new altenator wires and plugs. then everything ran good. that was a noobie mistake on mypart..but anyways good luck with the fix!

 

I covered the cap/rotor but had plug wire cover off. Washed the motor like I always do and it started sputtering.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by PatrickGSR94 &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">


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It's good to see someone else who's not so inclined to spend 45 bucks on NGK platinum plugs. V-Powers work great!

I just had a HUGE debate with a friend over copper vs platinum.


Modified by wreckedmyteg at 10:01 PM 4/9/2006

 

haha no way dude, I've been using NGK coppers for well over 100K miles, changing them every 10K-15K miles. These in the pic only have like 5K on them but I'm going to change them anyway.