Hello all hear is my story

I drove from west palm beach to Orlando about 166 miles and the car was running rough when I got to Orlando, it was fluttering like starving for gas, I knew I needed a tune up so I went to Pep boys and had it done for 339.00. After I got the car back it was doing the same thing, I called them up and they said it would be best to have a diagnostic ran on it before you do anything else. I said great now I have to pay for that too? They said no we will do it for free. It turns out my Opti spark distributor was bad and needed to be replaced, I asked them how much and their reply was 717.00 for the job. LMAO I said ok thanks and went over to autozone to buy an opti. Auto zone also did a code check and said that I needed an MAF sensor so I bought that and changed it for 138.00 when I got home and started I then found out why it was so expensive to change out not to mention the parts itself at 275.00.

Anyway I changed it out and put it all back together to only discover 3 things.
1. I have an oil leak (oil leak was there previously but now worse, its like just constantly dripping like if you were to take a eyedrop dropper and constantly keep dripping the liquid)
2. The car Idle is at 1500 rpms after unscrewing the Idle screw all the way down.
3. running straight water The car is overheating at an idle

I took off the water pump to locate the oil leak because of the shaft that turns the water pump was missing the O rings, I installed the O rings and put the pump back on, I took the thermostat out and put the housing back on refilled it with water and the car over heated not to mention water spued out from the housing as well because i did not put the little rubber gasket on when i took the thermostat out.

I read up on lowering the Idle and I took both PCM fuses out, put them back in and then let the car idle for 5 minutes then put it in drive and let it idle for 5 minutes and shut it off but the idle did not lower any.

The car is stil overheating and the fans are coming on when it reaches 260 degrees.

I am really pissed about spending close to $1000.00 on everything and have the car F'ed up like this still.

Any suggestions? I jacked it up and looked underneath to find the oil leak but only thing I saw was under the crank case is a 10mm bolt and a electric plug plugging into it and under the pully there was some oil but I did not see where it was spuing from now underneath the distributor cap on the white part is some oil.

What can I do with out taking it to some shop to get ripped off again

Thanks
Jimmy

 

For the overheating, make sure your fans are working and that you have the correct size thermosat in there. A typical SBC thermostat won't work.

As for the idle. Sounds like you have a vaccuum issue. What year is your car?? If it's a 95-97, make sure that BOTH opti vaccuum tubes are connected. Also make sure that the vacuum lines going to the passenger side of the TB are both connected. Off the top of my head those are the only ones that should be messed with if they did the opti correctly.

 

1996 camaro Z28 5.7 350

yup I think its my thermostat and also there is a sensor that tells the fan when to come on that i am going to change.

Is there a way to put a switch on the fan so they come on sooner? I think I read somewhere that there is and you have to wire it to the back of the fuse box but I am not so good at wiring things when it comes to pulling the fuse box out and seeing spaghetti.

I checked for vacum hoses that are disconnected and there are none, I have been looking around the engine for days so far and all hoses are connected to my knowledge.

The computer is not throwing any codes, the engine light is off, when you drive normal car is fine, when you floor it she shuts completely off.

Thanks
Jimmy

 

Where is the oil leak? It is usually a good idea to replace all the oil control seals in the front cover when you change the opti.