My 244 died on me yesterday? Ok it is not really dead, but it is not drivable. Currently the issue is that it will start up fine, but then it will within 5-10 seconds do a little hunting then sputter out and stop. If I keep the accelerator on it will not stall but it even flooring it has about 10% of the power it should have and a bunch of the warning lights on the dash will flash. I have a 6 month old voltage regulator in there, new rotor and distributor cap, not new wires, and a new air filter, I also replaced my pre-pump this summer.

A little background on the issue: A while ago randomly a bunch of the lights on the dash started flashing on and off for like 30 seconds then it went away, but the lights would keep pulsing like I had a bad voltage regulator ( I replaced mine for this very reason this summer ). Then after a few minutes it would go away and everything was fine. This happened to me at least twice. And I figured that maybe I got some water on the alternator grounding it out and then it dried up and everything was fine.
Yesterday it did this and it was all rainy and sucky out. I figured it would go away but it got much worse. It had major loss of power to the point of when at full throttle it I could putt putt around side streets to get to a parking lot. To scare me even worse it started making some backing noise intermittently, as if ever second or two, someone threw a hand sized rock at the bottom of the car.

So I got the car towed back to school where it sat overnight. The next morning I started it up to see how it was acting and it idled fine. Then I drove it to the gas station ½ mile away avoiding puddles carefully along the way in case that caused the problem (it is at this point no longer raining). It was doing fine until I got into the gas station when it died on me again. I restarted it and got it to the pump so I could fill it up in case the pre-pump had failed on me again. No good upon starting it again it idled for a few seconds and died on me again. So I then drove it all pathetic and crippled ¼ mile up the road to the only shop I know of in the area and left it there. In that ¼ mile I had to restart it 2x and I still barely got it there.

Basically anybody know what is wrong with my car?

I would love to fix it myself if I could only get it home 35 miles away.

Thanks

Scott
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1989 Volvo 240 DL 193k Miles