Ok backstory I'm cheap I buy cheap pieces of junk fix them drive them for a few years sell them and usually turn a profit this escape makes me want to go the way of the dinosaurs I picked it up for 300 body great condition engine has a miss he swore no body ever tried to fix it it was dark and the notary was about to close so I paid the money thinking id fix and this would be my daily driver fast forward the next morning I pop the hood I notice valve covers are both leaking bolts are loose upper intake plenum bolts are loose random bolts are missing everywhere I think its all good a couple gaskets and shell be good to go so heres the list the misfire was due to a genius having coil on plug wires reversed it misfired for so long the cat all melted so I had to cut exhaust of to get it to even stay running once I had her running with new coil on plugs and spark plugs I noticed it idled horribly up and down in park and neutral and just down in drive or reverse my scanner shows it would idle between 550 and 850 not in gear and between 350 and 500 in gear so I decide to replace a few things since it wasn't throwing codes I did upper and lower intake gaskets both valve cover gaskets iac valve tps sensor cleaned the maf replaced pcv checked for vacuum leaks with carb cleaner couldn't find any fast forward again she does run better about 750 in park or neutral fairly steady but any strain on motor dropps the idle ac running light on putting a window up and most importantly putting in gear my scanner shows around 600 in gear after it levels but when you first throw it in gear it drops to about 200 I would say sometimes it stalls depending if you have heater on or not my oil pressure light flickers in gear I'm assuming because of idle speed being so low and raise in rpms shuts the light off I just gave it an oil change 5w 20 as manual stated I put synthetic in after I gave it an oil change now my valves are ticking fairly loud at idle they quiet when raising rpms to about 1500 fast forward driving to work yesterday I finally got a code misfire cylinder 4 hooked my scanner up fuel injector cylinder 4 dead replaced yesterday major power increase and whe I un plug coil 4 it actually makes a difference in engine performance now so that's good I guess so I'm driving after injector change and I notice it spits and sputters on acceleration for the first minute or so of driving now it does it at start off in first and when trying to give it gas in overdrive it sputters bad so bad you have to floor it to make it upshift but like I said it only does it for about a minute then levels off it thru me another code yesterday cylinder 4 misfire again so I was thinking maybe plug is fouled because of not getting any gas for three days while it was running on 5 cylinders so I swapped it no more sputtering until today its at it again for the first minute of driving it does it also still have low idle and engine oil light flickering and any load on engine tries to kill it unless I give it gas ps ive also tried resetting pcm learned values and reteaching it which did make it stop stalling in gear but it stills idles horribly low
so current symptoms sputtering for 1 minute after intial start usually worse when cold
really low idle in gear dropps to 200 then levels out
any load on engine tries to stall it
ticking coming from front and rear valve covers gets quieter at about 1500 in park
flickering oil light in gear I believe may be due to low idle not sure sometimes flickers in park but only when engine is warmed up
sometimes when cold engine idles nice for about 5 min even in drive around 750 to 800
Thursday, July 19th, 2018 AT 2:18 PM
(Merged)