Howdy folks, my buddy has a 94 Camaro with an LT1/4l60E and his car will just cut out and die now and then while driving. It doesn't studder, it just instantly dies and its pretty scary to loose power breaks at speed. The car normally starts on the first or second crank, however, if it dies it takes almost 5 seconds worth of cranking to start it.

Let me add that it dies SMOOTH, infact you can't even tell its died until you glance at the gauges...or try to steer/break/accelerate

I was thinking that mabey the car has a bad ground somewhere? Not really sure, the volt guage is reading normal and I even went to the trouble of splicing in an autometer volt guage which also read normal.

Mabey that, or I noticed his MAF looks kinda beat up, well the wires look fine but he has some ghetto fabbed cold air intake made from pvc and his maf just sits on the fender and bounces as the car goes along...think a bad maf could cause this random dieing?

Also how about a bad coil wire?


Thanks for any ideas!

 

Possible bad maf the other thing i might lean toward would be weak fuel pump.

 

My guess is the ignition system. The car should run with a flakey MAF. Does it have an aftermarket ignition system? If so, bypass it and see if the problem goes away.

 

The ignition is all stock, actually the car is all stock save for his ghetto cold air intake

Well went for a ride yesterday with him, first 20 minutes it ran fine, no problems...then it started dieing like every 2 minutes almost always before a big intersection

After it died, it was difficult to start and took mabey 4 attempts of cranking the motor for 5 seconds. A few times we actually pushed it off the road, waited a few minutes, then started it. Once it started, it seemed fine...didn't run rough at all but just kept dieing randomly. And once it actually died while we were going 40 mph, then it just came back to life


- We tried a different coil wire, but that didn't help
- Tried running with the maf unplugged, didn't help
- I had a fuel pressure gauge hooked up to the car and fuel pressure was fine

It seems like the car doesn't start dieing until its been driving for 15-20 minutes....

Im going to try putting a new ignition coil in tonight and see if that helps, any more thoughts?

Thanks all!

 

Maybe bad opti its hard to diagnose without having a scanner on it to look at all the inputs it could be losing cam or crank signal could be a pcm problem

 

Ya, the LT1 opti's are pretty bad.. but.. what you've described doesnt sound like thats it.. if it was a bad ground then you would be trying to turn something on thats causing it to die.. check all fuses etc. Most of the time, if it was a bad ground you even be able to crank it up i dont think.. Fuel pump is most likely the problem.. if it stops turning your exact symptoms take place.

 

Hey, I appricate all the follow ups guys! I put a fuel pressure gauge on the car, this time I drove around with it tapped to the windshield (before was just testing at idle) and im sure its the fuel pump now. Fuel pressure dips down to 10s-20s while driving...then drops to zero, engine then dies...after that, when i try to start the car the fuel pump doesn't come on and build any pressure (couldn't even hear it)