I finally drove my car today, after two agonizing weeks without it. Yay! It lives!

Sort of. Heh.

What it's not doing:
Leaking oil.
Blowing smoke of any color.



What it is doing:
Idling like a crack whore sitting down to her first few hits of the day. It jumps up to 2000 rpms, then bottoms out to zero, then jumps up to 2K, then bottoms out to zero (occasionally it will die at this point, but that's infrequent). Over and over. Never levels out. Then, once it's been driven a bit it goes to jumping to 2K then dropping to 1K, lather, rinse & repeat.

Exhibiting a sort of flattening out (almost as if it wants to lose power, but it doesn't - I'm not sure how else to explain this) and then a fairly harsh jerk right around 2900-3100 rpms while accelerating. To me, this feels like a fuel delivery issue of some sort. It was doing this before we pulled the engine, although it is much less pronounced now than it was before. The flatten&jerk is intermittent, not constant. It reminds me of the way it felt when one of the injectors went bad, except that there's no loss of power.

Other than that, it feels pretty damn good. It's very responsive and energetic. It feels like it wants to drive good once we get these minor issues sussed and settled.

And yes, Miles - I figured out how to shift again.



Now I'm off to make my landlord happy by scrubbing the oil that used to leak out of my car off my driveway.

Sounds like a vacuum leak, Queenie. Congrats on getting it on the road again!

-Rusty

Thanks, Rusty! Vacuum leak doesn't sound heinous...I'm sure we'll get all the details worked out this week and I'll be back to zipping around town like a speed demon in no time at all.

I sure feel a lot better about it now than I did on Friday!

Make sure all the vacuum hoses are seated properly, as well as the injector seals etc...I hope your guy replaced the seals by the intake runners, and the injector seals if they were in poopr condition.

a faulty AAR would do that to you.

take the hose off that goes from the AAR to the intake (not air-cleaner) and plug it. if that fixes your jumpy idle, it's the AAR ...

Andy

EDIT:
by fixing, i mean it doesn't jump anymore. it still could be way to high or low when hot or cold

Chris, we did all new injector seals all the way around. I don't know about intake seals, but I know Pancho is thorough and if they were bad he would have replaced them.

Thing is, we replaced all kinds of hose all over the place (dang emissions control stuff has hoses going six ways from Sunday) so it wouldn't be at all unlikely for one of them to be not quite where it ought to be. I will have him check when he gets back from Vegas.

I'm wracking my brain...AAR? Help me out with that one.

Pancho did mention to me that he unhooked the air hose going to the manifold (I think I'm remembering that correctly, or close to correctly) and that brought the idle right down to perfect...but then it started blowing black smoke which would mean it's way too rich.

auxiliary air regulator

used for cold start, basically a controlled vacuum leak if working correctly, a very uncontrolled one if faulty.
mine just died a few weeks ago, idle was jumpy between 100 and 2000, got a bit better when warm, but not much.
disconnected the AAR and plugged the hose, idle is a bit rough at cold now but perfect at warm ...

Andy

Ah, gotcha. I'll have the boy check it out.

Oddly enough, when I went to start it up to move it from the street to the driveway this afternoon, it idled perfectly. I thought it was so odd that I sat there for a few minutes waiting for it to start jumping, but it didn't.

We'll see how it goes tomorrow when I drive it to work. Thank dog, I only have a two mile commute.

Compare your set up to this

Queenie,

Click here to learn a little about how the d-jet system works (AAR etc.) and how to troubleshoot it. There's also a link there to Brad Anders' d-jet page.

Thanks for all the great tips, folks. I'm going to see if I can't get Pancho to tackle this stuff later this week; hopefully he'll be refreshed from having spent a few days in Vegas instead of working on my car and he'll be ready to give it a shot. If we can't work it out, I'll make an appointment with John Larson.

Hmmm....refreshed....Vegas.....that never seemed to work for me

It sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it? But I'm betting on three days of drinking being more relaxing than two weeks of working on your ex-wife's pain-in-the-ass 914.