[Beav]

Originally posted by vkykam

The one regarding the injector is because car starts fine on cold, car starts fine on hot, but car struggles to start (8-9 turnovers before it catches) on warm (car sits for 1-4 hours). I smelled fuel out of right front cylinder when I removed the plug, so I'm suspecting a leaking injector. That could have been the last injector to fire when you turned the engine off. Maybe it means something, maybe not... Normally fuel problems are worst at either cold or hot. Excessive fuel in a hot engine makes it difficult to start. Slightly low fuel pressure can keep them from starting, especially when cold. Normally warm starts are the easiest, from a fuel standpoint. This problem makes me wonder if there isn't something else wrong. BTW - excessive fuel will always result in some amount of black smoke at the tailpipe when started - try to keep an eye out for that.

The old plugs that came out, all of them looked normal. An obviously bad plug would help immensely, but smaller problems don't leave huge tell-tale signs, unfortunately.

The hesitation problem, I went and replaced the fuel pump anyways, because it wasn't outrageously expensive, my girlfriend's caused me to run out of fuel on the car twice (don't ask), and I wanted to get to the tank anyways to fix the sender (which now works 80%+ of the time instead of 10%). Anyhoo, hesitation *seems* to be gone, but need a few more days to confirm. I'm wondering, given your geography, if you're not experienceing the same problems many of us experienced 'down here' with the winter blend fuels as the weather warmed up. There's several different posts regarding it, you might search back and see if they apply to your case.

But the third problem, which I thought might have been related to the second problem, is the erratic idle. It's happening less since I replaced the fuel pump, but it's still there. I'm going to try to get a vacuum gauge on the car next week and let the car idle to see if I can get it to act up. Erratic idle is caused by a vacuum leak 80% of the time. A vacuum gauge is a great diagnostic tool for mechanical problems, but given the fact that computer driven cars adjust themselves for so many operating fluctuations, it's not as useful for tuning purposes as it was in days past. I'm assuming you've cleaned the throttle body well, it's the number two cause of erratic idle. When the throttle blades don't completely close at idle the computer gets all 'weirded out', the idle air controller goes wacky and the idle portion of the program falls apart. There's many other possible contributors to this problem, but they're nowhere as prevalent as these.