I recently bought an 88 caprice wagon. It's a relatively clean car. It was supposed to need an intake manifold gasket. The po apparently put some stop leak in it and it worked. I may change it anyway. And flush the cooling system. Regardless, it runs great when you first start it up. As soon as it warms up, you can smell the rich exhaust, and it runs terrible. Missing at idle, bogging, poor acceleration. WOT it will accelerate ok on the flat, but up a hill it seems to seriously lack power. You can hear the secondaries open. I replaced O2 sensor that was literally broken in 2. I bought plugs, wires, cap, rotor, and fuel filter. I will change all that tomorrow. I'll also check coolant sensor resistance. Anyone have specs on that? CEL is apparently gone or burned out, it does not come on when I turn the key on, before I start the engine. I will replace to read codes. Any ideas? Am I overlooking something. It has the 307 olds. If its a carburetor issue, I honestly may just swap to a 5.3 gm truck engine.

 

Tune up solved the problem. I'm honestly very surprised. Fuel consumption is better, power is better, miss is gone, bogging is gone. I'm suspecting that the cap and rotor were the real culprits. The contacts on both were pretty scarred. I used an accel cap and rotor, delco plugs, and wires. It's is very apparent that it needs more power though. And a couple more gears. The 1-2 drop is pretty significant.

 

Glad to hear that you somewhat improved your issue. While the Olds 307 is a decent engine, it's picky with a CCC quadrajet and vacuum lines. How do the vacuum lines look on the car? Any dry crack lines anywhere?

 

Does it have electrical or electronic controls to / at the carb ?

We had a 82 or 84 Impala . With air injection to the exhaust manafolds . The had a valve for each side , that I think was like a check valve . To prevent backfires from going back and damaging the smog pump . They had burnt through .

replaced one or both of them . That helped . Also had holes in the branch " pipes " taking air to each exhaust port in the exhaust manifold . Repaired that .

All together , I think the repairs allowed the electronics to better control the carb . Started getting better gas mileage .

Do not know if your engine has anything like this ?

As mentioned above , if in doubt , replace any vacuum lines or sensors that look questionable . Check all the electrical connections to the other sensors .

God bless
Wyr