[WhatIsThisIDont]

I put it up on one of the Facebook pages and got some answers, but I figured I'd put it here if you guys have any more ideas.

So I let my roommate borrow the car to go to work and I got the call this afternoon that it stalled out on him on the hill coming right up to the dorm buildings. So I walk down to him and the car starts up (while sounding very rough), but when I put it in gear, it would just stall out. It was a busy road and I couldn't roll it back down the hill, do I held the brakes and rev'd it to about 2k and let go. This got it to climb a bit until it stalled again. I repeated this (while crying on the inside) a few times until I got to the dorm about 100 feet up the hill.

Once I got it parked, it coughed a good bit while starting, and if I would try to rev it in park, it filibustered it's way to around 3k and just died around there. I checked the codes, even though no CEL came up. I got a code 37, which has been there before, and I knew the ground under the ignitor was pretty rough, so I cleaned it up nicely and dielectric greased it.

I also have a spare MAF from a 90's something auto Legacy, so I plugged that in to test. No big difference there.

After the ground was done, it rev'd very well when parked, started easily, and sounded great, so I took it for a 5 mile test run with some moderate hills, but mostly flat. I stopped on some of the hills, and it took off with very little throttle or wide open. On flat ground, it takes off like it never has before. There is no hesitation, the throttle response is almost instant whereas it would fall on it's face before. The power is also very smooth and the butt dyno completely freaked out because it's never ran this well for me.

The test drive went well, so I was feeling confident when I tried to climb the same hill. It was longer and steeper than any on the test run, and starting about 50 feet up this 200 foot hill, I could tell something was off. There was no power at any throttle, and it barely coughed back to the parking lot. There was no CEL, from beginning to end.

So between what I've been thinking and what I've seen on Facebook (Thanks, Nate), the possibilities are:

1: Timing is off
2: Vacuum leak
3: It's the O2 code that the ECU has stored?
4: Throttle Pos. Sensor
5: Coils

I'll go out tomorrow or Saturday and spray around looking for vacuum leaks, but where do I even begin to diagnose the other possibilities?


Thanks again for all your help, guys. This thing would still be stuck and undrivable if it weren't for the info you guys have shared. Thanks for putting up with the long post.

-Randy

TL;DR: I accidentallied the whole car. Please halp.