[DML] car mysteriously dies - still!
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[DML] car mysteriously dies - still!




Group,

Last week I posted on here about how my car has been randomly dying ever 
since I took it out of storage last week.  

To recap, here are the symptoms:
1. Car will start up fine, hunt, then settle down like normal.
2. At seemingly random times the engine will quit but all accessories such as 
lights and radio are unaffected.  the engine just dies.  
3. Car will never restart immediately.  Takes from 15 seconds to a couple 
minutes and then it will restart.
4. While the car is dead, I have attempted to tap major running parts and 
connections to find something loose that could be causing it.  i can find no 
positive correlation.
5. While the car is running, I am unsucessful in causing the engine to die on 
purpose by tapping parts, jiggling wires, etc.
6. I used to think the problem was vibration induced because once as soon as 
i shut the driver's door the car quit. however today I just had the car idling 
in my garage and it died about half a dozen times.  
7. Someone suggested my ignition switch may be bad. With the car running, I 
can't get the car to die by banging on the steering wheel so I don't think 
that's the problem.

In celebration of the Easter holiday today I spent some major quality time 
looking for problems.  

Today I did the following:
1. Checked all fuses and put dielectric grease on them
2. Greased and checked all relays. 
3. Cleaned and greased the stud behind the rear passenger wall on the 
inside-side of the colored junction box where all the brown wires go.
4. Cleaned and greased the aux positive connection on pontoon.
5. Used electrical cleaner and greased frequency valve, CPR, idle speed 
motor, cold start, ignition coil, ignition resistor, and pulse coil electrical 
connections. 
6. pulled all spark plugs, regapped, tested compression, greased connections.
7. checked and tightened battery connections and negative terminal on rear 
trailing arm ground point.
8. checked wiring at inertia switch
9. Swapped ignition coils to no effect. Car died with either coil. Also made 
sure that the main coil wire was tight on both ends. 
10. engine ground strap on engine cradle appears clean and tight (went 
through this one last year).
11. used electrical cleaner and tightened all bulkhead harnesses on pontoon 
by ignition coil.

This has me puzzled because the car didn't have this problem when I put it 
away last fall, now it has been doing this ever since I took it out this spring. 
 What's REALLY odd is that the car had this exact same problem last year when 
I took it out of storage but it cleared up after a couple days and never did 
it again. Until now that is. I filled the tank up with 87 octane and added a 
bottle of Stabil to the gas last fall.

A couple other things I have noticed that might help is that the frequency 
valve continues buzzing about 1/2 a second after the engine dies. Not sure if 
this is normal or not. The engine usually runs for about 5 minutes until it 
dies, and it has yet to die during warm up. It only does it once the car is at 
operating temp.  I haven't noticed any warning signs today right before the car 
dies but the day I took it out of storage, the RPM needle would jump once or 
twice before the car died sometimes.  But I did see that when i turn my stereo 
up pretty loud at idle the tachometer is much more jerky like the stereo is 
interferring with it.  Also, at idle the exhaust smells richer than I remember it 
being last year.  The engine doesn't run rough the rest of the time. It's 
pretty normal until it dies.

I am considering replacing the RPM relay and the pulse coil because I believe 
both are original. I measured ohms on the pulse coil and it gave about 685 
ohms.  Is that right?

Any other ideas out there?  



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