helocentric

2000 GMC Jimmy 4x4 4.3L Vortec motor.

I recently bought this car with a leaking intake manifold. The car did start and ran fine when I bought it. I tore it apart and replaced the upper and lower intake manfold gaskets, so it is entirely possible that I missed something putting it back together (although I believe everything is plugged in, I checked it over many times).

Now the car will not start on it's own. Turning the key and it just keeps cranking. I have confirmed that the timing is correct.

The car will start if I pour gasoline into the throttle body. Once I stop pouring gas into it manually, the engine stalls out.

I checked the fuel pressure and it is reading around 55 - 58 psi after the fuel pump kicks on. I do not notice it dropping after the pump shuts off.

I have read that the pressure should be around 60 - 66 psi in this vehicle, however I would expect that it should at least begin to fire up being within a couple of pounds, and additionally it ran fine a week ago before doing the tear down so its unlikely the fuel pump condition changed much over that time.

Any suggestions or tests I can run would be appreciated. From everything I am seeing, I believe it has to be a fuel delivery problem at or after the connection between the fuel line and the throttle body.

andrew61

I have a 1991 Mazda Miata MX-5. Last night we got a ton of rain and that translated into my headlights opening and closing incessantly. I thought they finally stopped because I kept an eye on them for a few hours after I got home. Apparently in the night they started up again and continued to open/close until the battery was dead. I tried to jump the car, and everything had power (the lights started to flap again) but the car wouldn't stay on when I released the ignition. To make sure it wasn't the headlights sapping too much power to actually run I pulled the headlight relay (which ended up solving the chaotic light show when I eventually plugged it back in) but still, the car will start strong but dies immediately.

Just to be sure I took the battery in even though it was powering everything, surprisingly the test showed the battery to be bad anyway so I got a brand new one under the warranty, still the car will only start for an instant before dying again. Also the "startup" is instant...no cranking at all, I turn the key and it's on faster than normal then dies just as fast. If I keep cranking it, it will keep turning over and every second or two it'll do another false start as long as I'm turning the ignition.

Two things that have been strange to me over the past couple months while my car was running with seemingly no problems that I have no idea could be correlated, but I figure I'll throw them out here in case they're relevant. As I would start the car about 75% of the time there would be a brief grinding noise, almost as if a gear were grinding...no idea what the cause is but I assume it can't be a gear grinding when the car is just starting up and perfectly in neutral. Also, lately the car would idle high - sometimes as high as 2k rpm - while the engine was cool, and as it approached normal temperature the idle would drop to it's normal place at about 1k.

I'm guessing this is going to be something that I'll need a mechanic for, but I'd appreciate any advice on what it could be/how to troubleshoot it. Hopefully it's nothing too spendy