It was running great ever since I installed my cam but then tonight all hell broke loose! I was over at a friends place looked at his car and checkin some things out with his new heads/cam install when we decided to take our cars out for a little cruise. well the cruise went fine and my car ran like a champ for all 5 or so miles we took them. After returning back to his house, I did nothing unusual shutting off the car to keep that in mind. I think him and I just shot the **** for about 10-15 min and I went home for the night. upon firing up the beast I could tell something wasnt quite right. it had little power and was idle kinda low/rough as well as popping thru the exhaust. I ran thru my scanmaster real quick and noticed nothing unusual at first until i got about a mile from my friends house and the car started to smell weird like it was getting hot. I had no DTCs and all my guages read normal. Then i noticed something extremely strange on the scanner... my spark timing was reading 01!! I had 1 degree of spark timing that would jump to 2 every so often. I immediately turned the car around and headed back to my friends place where i then popped to hood to see my headers glowing red hot from the poor timing issue. next i grabbed a fan to cool off my car and pulled the PCM fuse to clear it. after a few minutes i fired her back up and all was normal again so my question is... what the hell just happened to my car? i know i have read threads where cars run poor and headers glow red like my car did but it was only showing 1 degree of spark timing! i let you experts hash this little episode out

Sounds like a problem with the optical sensor signals in the distributor but the strange thing is you didn't mess with the wires to clear up the problem. Just for the hell of it check the wires and the pins in the connectors to the distributor and at the PCM.

i dunno... there werent any codes thrown. typically if the optical sensor malfunctions, you get a high/low resolution pulse DTC but i did not.

That sounds almost exactly what my car did when I burnt a plug wire. It ran fine on the way to a buddys shop and then I went to leave and the exhaust had a knocking in it. It took me forever to figure out it was just a burnt plug wire.

hey Joe theres a KSFBA gathering at the track down here in Wichita this Friday. you should come down and see some of the wichita f-body heat!

my problems definitely not a burnt plug wire. it would still show more than 1 degree of spark timing if a wire was burnt. i am starting to think the PCM was at fault.. some kinda error when i started the car.

Brad- Thanks for the invite but I am afraid I wont have much time to do anything this summer. I am working 60hrs a week. Its a bad thing for gatherings but it will be a VERY good thing when I get my FM-5s.

Definately something weird. Did you happen to run through any water? Sounds like you had some high heat in the electrical components or water in the opti.