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Well I had the first bad problem with my wife's car since we got it 9 months ago. I've listed a summary of the symptoms at the bottom just in case you don't care to read the story.
Thursday night it began stalling out while driving around my wife's mother's neighborhood. It always restarted easily so we decided to try to drive home. We made it home but it died several more times, usually while going around a turn or slowing to a stop. We drove the car to a wedding rehearsal on Friday night. It did fine on the drive there (~60 miles). The car wouldn't start when it was time to leave the church. I went back Saturday before the wedding and got it started but it was stalling just about every time that I went around a corner or made a turn. It finally died and would not restart. Luckily I was less than a couple of miles from my wife's aunt's house. I had AAA tow the car home and we all piled into my little bitty pickup for the drive home.
Here's what I've got:
1. Car will not start when its warm.
2. Car often stalls while turning.
3. When car is cold, it can be started but will often die when put into gear. If it doesn't die when its put into gear, then it will die as soon as you touch the throttle.
4. Occasionaly while driving on the highway, the engine will just die for a second and then restart and drive like nothing ever happened.
Here's what I've done:
1. I changed the fuel filter a few months ago and I don't think that I got the fittings quite tight on the filter because I have a slight gas smell while idling and it seems to be coming from below the driver's seat. I don't smell it inside the car unless the windows are down. More about this later.
2. I checked for spark today and I have spark.
3. I resoldered my fuel pump relay. I thought at first that this had helped, but it was just that the car had time to cool down.
4. I checked the connections to the charcoal canister because of the gas smell.
5. I just cleaned the throttle body and IAC a short time ago.
6. I believe the fuel injectors are fairly clean, I used a can of Amsoil PI probably a month or two ago.
By the way, the car is almost full of gas and the problem does not seem to be affected by the level of fuel in the tank.
I just returned from a 1,000 mile round trip and the car performed beautifully. Only when we were about 100 miles from home did it start giving me any trouble. And its gotten progressively worse to the point that now the car will not make it to the end of my street. The only detail that I think I need to include about the trip is that I know the car has a fuel leak. I could actually smell it on the interstate intermittently. I've never smelled this while driving before, only while idling.
I'm going to be reading the FAQ for a while because it seems like there's a lot of info about problems similar to mine. Hopefully someone will know what is wrong so I can get my wife's car back on the road.
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Don Tibbetts; Living in the Florida Panhandle - soon to be known as Disney World North - The St. Joe Kingdom; 92 745T 98K mi
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