kevinfish

Hi, I'm working on a friend's '89 Celebrity convertible. Some girl he met had the car and told him it ran great, so he bought it from her to help out a friend at work by selling her and her boyfriend the car on time payments (not a lot of money) because they were desperate for a car. The car would randomly and frequently just die leaving them stranded. Come to find out the first girl lied as the owner prior to her confirmed the car stranded him. The boyfriend tried fixing it, which mostly amounted to resealing the intake manifold. Eventually he gave up as the car was eating him alive financially so I went to their house to try and fix it so they could keep it. I checked all the sensors and eventually it became DOA so I was able to isolate it to a bad connection where the loom goes through the firewall and I sistered the wire. This was last year so I can't recall what wire it was exactly. Well, problems persisted with the car and the couple ended up getting a company car for his new job so they wanted us to come pick the Chevy up. I went down there with the seller and it wouldn't start again so we trailered it back and here a year later I'm trying to get it fixed right so he can sell it. It wouldn't even fire a bit this time. First I cleaned the connector with solvent then with baking soda paste plugging and unplugging it, then rinsed with fresh water, rubbing alcohol, compressed air, WD-40, then grease and reassembled. That seemed to work, but it had low few pressure and it was getting lower. I finally isolated it to something wrong with the plumbing inside the tank because I could hear the pump running and it had good voltage, but by jumping the relay and pulling the Schrader valve on the fuel rail, it would barely pump the fuel out of the tank (for emptying purposes so I could drop it and get to the pump).

When I got inside, I discovered the "pulsator" (a little coupler with an entrained air bubble I guess to balance out any pulses that might come out of the pump) silicon grommets had deteriorated so I replaced that, put the tank back up and now I had good pressure. However, now the car only wants to run while the key is cranking, kind of like how an old car would do when the primary resistor had gone bad.

I also put my inductive timing light on a plug wire while cranking it and it kept firing until the engine stopped rotating even long after the engine had stopped trying to run, so I know its not spark.

I decided to then check to see if there was a vacuum seal gone bad so I got my gage, pulled the fuel pump relay out (so hopefully it wouldn't even TRY and start) and tried cranking it to check cranking vacuum. Well, it ran BETTER, randomly dying between like 1 and 5 seconds after releasing the key!

I blew some smoke into the intake and some came out on the bottom of the big hose that goes between the air filter and the throttle plate so there's a bit of a hole there. I noticed there is a sensor on the air filter housing but since this part of the system isn't in vacuum I'm kind of doubting this is the ultimate reason why its not running. I'm going to go put some silicone on the hole, but I'm wondering if anyone else has any ideas about what this might be or how to go about debugging it.

Thanks in advance,

-Kevin