relyt
NAXJA Forum User
- Location
- Sidney, OH
I'm suffering from intermittent stalling/hard starting, and I think it may be the ballast resistor. Does anyone know the spec for the resistor? I have an ohm meter, but I have no idea what it should read.
I'm suffering from intermittent stalling/hard starting, and I think it may be the ballast resistor. Does anyone know the spec for the resistor? I have an ohm meter, but I have no idea what it should read.
Battery cables are good. The ground strap isn't pretty, but if that's the primary chassis ground, I would assume that if it dies, that would kill the radio and lights as well, which it has never done.It should not cause a hard start problem - it's more likely to cause a "Start, No Run" issue instead. You'd lose the engine a few seconds after you let the key back into RUN from START.
I'm surprised I hadn't thought of this before - check the ground strap from the firewall to the cylinder head. Make sure it's clean, make sure the contact patches are clean (particularly on the chassis,) and make sure it hasn't soaked up any crud - if it's original, it probably has. It's the primary ground for the chassis, and therefore for the engine control unit - and if it starts getting flaky on you, it's going to raise all kinds of Hell...
And, take a look at your positive battery cable (at the battery,) and make sure you don't have a corroded conductor on the smaller of the two cables exiting the clamp. Losing that connexion will kill power to everything, and can be goofy to figure out if you don't know what you're looking for.
Battery cables are good. The ground strap isn't pretty, but if that's the primary chassis ground, I would assume that if it dies, that would kill the radio and lights as well, which it has never done.
I do know that I still have a pretty severe blow-by issue. I changed the valve cover gasket and the whole CCV system, cleaned up the valve cover inside and out, including all of the baffles, and I still have oil blowing out the top of the valve cover, from under the grommet at the back with the smaller diameter vacuum line coming out of it. If this oil got on the the CPS, would that potentially cause the issues I'm experiencing?
I hate to say this, considering this thing has only 130k miles on it, but I'm seriously considering driving it a mile down the road to the junk yard and asking what they'd give me for it.
Not that it matters much now with my '91, but I was always curious with my old '87 just how that ballast resistor worked. It was my understanding that it was wired in series with the fuel pump when in the run circuit. Meaning that if the resistor failed open, or you disconnected it, the fuel pump would shut off. I ran my '87 with the wires completely disconnected, but NOT jumpered for a week before I realized that I had forgotten to reconnect them after I removed them to clean them. Shouldn't that have caused a start but not run condition?