|
Gotta love those K-jet cars! I do.
Your wagon sounds like mine, and I have every confidence that with Mr. Art's wise advice you'll be back to major reliability in short order. I learn a lot from his advice and his approach, and always look forward to his latest postscript witticism.
Here's the minor contribution I can make to the fault-tracing help already offered: Start with the tank.
The stumbling you describe sounds very much like an earlier puzzle of mine: intermittent and unpredictable stalling which would usually present after the can had run awhile. I finally determined that my problem was fuel starvation caused by the rust my old gas tank was shedding into the fuel system.
The insides of the gas tanks in cars our age can get awfully rusty, especially if runnin-on-empty for long periods. The water that condenses on the inside walls of the tank eventually turns the tank to rust. And lots of it. I'm afraid that once large-scale rusting has begun there is just no getting ahead of it. I flushed my tank several times and while I thought I had it pretty clean with all the loose particles gone, days later the problem would recur.
At one point I was set to install a new main fuel pump, thinking that my cleaning of the tank was adequate and that the main pump had finally failed under all the extra work of moving so much rust to the filter. When I disconnected the fuel line leading from pump to filter, expecting a small faceful of gas, nothing but a few drops came out. A moment later the dam burst--once I was out of the way-- and a small flood of thick, rusty gas came pouring out of the fuel line. The main pump itself was still functional, but had packed the fuel line from it to the filter with rusty junk from the tank so that all flow through the fuel line was intermittently blocked. You could imagine what the inside of the filter looked like.
What surprised me, in hindsight, was that the car could still sometimes run reasonably well in this condition, I suppose because the blockage would occasionally shift or clear a little. My efforts at flushing the tank had little lasting effect. Rust is relentless.
My solution was a boneyard tank and sender unit which I thoroughly cleaned and coated with a product made for that purpose by the folks at POR-15. No problem since.
So, my suggestion to you would be to consider the gas tank.
Good luck with it!
|
