4 wire ECS distributor troubleshooting
December 26th, 2016, 11:49 PM
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4 wire ECS distributor troubleshooting
I first posted this here, to an El Camino forum but haven't gotten much in the way of information. Maybe someone here can help me out a little more!
So I have an 83 El Camino with a 305 that I'm working on that I think has some timing issues. It's all stock as far as I can tell and I just finished replacing a good portion of the cracked and rotted vacuum hoses and fittings for the smog, choke pull offs and other misc items.
The original problem that I was trying to solve was a high idle (About 1100 RPM) and dieseling during a hot shut-down that I thought was due to the high idle RPMs.
I was also asked to do a tune up so I replaced coil, cap, rotors, plugs and checked timing.
This vehicle has the 4-wire plug off the passenger side of the distributor, not a vacuum advance.
Checking the timing, per the sticker under the hood, I saw that the timing was advanced beyond the range of the indicator over the balancer.
I pulled the 4 wire plug on the dizzy, set the timing to the 2* indicated on the factory under-hood sticker, re-set the idle to 500 RPM and everything was groovy. I did all of this while plugging the port on the carb that goes to the flapper in the air filter housing that decides if the engine gets cool air or manifold heated air.
If the nipple on the carb that goes to the filter housing is left un-plugged, I get higher RPMs by about 300. Since that's basically a vacuum leak, I figured that's normal and set the timing with that nipple plugged...although only the RPMs and not the timing change if it's left open.
When I connect the 4 wire plug while the engine is running, the engine dies, as I think it should. But when I go to restart, the engine runs really rough and dies after about a minute of terrible struggle and won't chooch at all when put in gear.
I'm not sure sure where to troubleshoot next; I'm inclined to think that the ESC module could be bad, but I can't find much troubleshooting online and I don't really want to just throw parts at this thing.
Is there some troubleshooting that I'm missing or something else that I'm doing wrong?
The owner insists that a little dieseling on shutdown is a "Feature," of this engine, but I can't believe that's true. This thing should take off from a stop without a lag and should shut down with no problems as far as I can tell.
Thanks in advance for any help!
So I have an 83 El Camino with a 305 that I'm working on that I think has some timing issues. It's all stock as far as I can tell and I just finished replacing a good portion of the cracked and rotted vacuum hoses and fittings for the smog, choke pull offs and other misc items.
The original problem that I was trying to solve was a high idle (About 1100 RPM) and dieseling during a hot shut-down that I thought was due to the high idle RPMs.
I was also asked to do a tune up so I replaced coil, cap, rotors, plugs and checked timing.
This vehicle has the 4-wire plug off the passenger side of the distributor, not a vacuum advance.
Checking the timing, per the sticker under the hood, I saw that the timing was advanced beyond the range of the indicator over the balancer.
I pulled the 4 wire plug on the dizzy, set the timing to the 2* indicated on the factory under-hood sticker, re-set the idle to 500 RPM and everything was groovy. I did all of this while plugging the port on the carb that goes to the flapper in the air filter housing that decides if the engine gets cool air or manifold heated air.
If the nipple on the carb that goes to the filter housing is left un-plugged, I get higher RPMs by about 300. Since that's basically a vacuum leak, I figured that's normal and set the timing with that nipple plugged...although only the RPMs and not the timing change if it's left open.
When I connect the 4 wire plug while the engine is running, the engine dies, as I think it should. But when I go to restart, the engine runs really rough and dies after about a minute of terrible struggle and won't chooch at all when put in gear.
I'm not sure sure where to troubleshoot next; I'm inclined to think that the ESC module could be bad, but I can't find much troubleshooting online and I don't really want to just throw parts at this thing.
Is there some troubleshooting that I'm missing or something else that I'm doing wrong?
The owner insists that a little dieseling on shutdown is a "Feature," of this engine, but I can't believe that's true. This thing should take off from a stop without a lag and should shut down with no problems as far as I can tell.
Thanks in advance for any help!
