olds pickup update?

old., we havent heard the results of the pickup troubles,. how has it been going? did you find what the problem was?

Nope no clue yet as to why it will run fine one day and not the next. Or why the check engine light comes on one time and not the next or if I hit a bump it will come on or go off. About to put one of the motorcycles in the back so if it does die on me I can just jump on the bike and ride home for the Chev to haul it back. Last time I had to haul it home that way it started right up and drove on the trailer no problems and that was before I put the fuel pump in

Old
I had an Chevy Luv (Isuzu) pickup that did the same thing. Finaly found that it had an in the fuel pump filter and it was clogged. removed filter and problem solved. Tried to buy a replacement filter for it and the only way to get one was to buy the whole pump. Put an inline in it

Rich I feel kind of sheepish making this suggestion to an experienced mechanic, but could there be a bad spot in the fuel pump wire or a connector in the wire barely making contact? Son had that happen with a Chevy pickup. There was a broken wire inside the insulation just before the connector at the pump. The pickup would come home on the end of a tow rope and then he would start it up and drive it into the shop.

This is not a suggestion - just a statement of fact. I had a 1972 Buick back in the early 80's. It would stall, then after a while it would start and run well for a while and then stall. After way too much messing with it, and being left stranded way too many times, I found a crack in the flexible fuel line that went up over the differential. Replaced about fifty cents worth of fuel line and never had a bit of trouble out of it again.

Those intermittent problems are by far the hardest to fix. Don't you wish it would break completely and just let you fix it?

Good luck,

Tom in TN

Yep them iffy problems can drive you nuts and cost you a lot of $$ to boot. I do have one of the guys from this site that has a code reader that will be stopping by when he is in the area to read the code so maybe we will find the problem. I did know the fuel pressure seemed low and at first that seemed to fix it then back to its old self and not wanting to spin up the RPMs so it would pull

one other thing that can happen is a colapse in a rubber hose especialy when it gets hot.Friend of mine had a deisel do somthing like that and i told him to check lines.Took air compresor and blew in the line found a pin holl in one off the steel lines

one more thing to add to the list of things for old to do , the list is constantly growing! Do you think the list will ever narrow down? lol

Rich, since no one else wanted to come off as a smart a$$, I'll do it for the group.

Pour ATF down the intake. )

Gene

I'll go along with the fuel line thing.

2 instances I experienced were:

On a 69 ford stake truck I bought, it would run like a champ for a while.. Maybe a mile, maybe 5, or maybe 50.. finally one day it made me mad, and I started throwing money at it.. Pulled every line and replaced it. Found one line about 2 feet long, looked good on the outside.. Pulled it off, full of crud. Tapped the crud out on the workbench, and then you could find a lot of tiny pinholes in the line.

And as of a little lately, I bought a spool of fuel hose (5/16) from NAPA about 2 years ago (I go through a small spool 25' or so in a average year on misc projects) and it seems as if every piece I used for fuel has rapidly deteriorated from the inside out. Never had it happen before.. Maybe I got a bad spool, as the spool I bought since don't seem to do it.


Brad

I had a car that did stuff like that one time.It was a Buick Starfire or something like that.It had an electric fuel pump in the tank,which I replaced a couple if times,and didnt fix it.One day it quit,and I hooked an electric fuel pump in the line under the hood,and it fixed it.It had a carburetor on it so an electric fuel pump like that only cost about 20 dollars.That pump in the tank always seemed like a bad idea to me.I had a Ford pickup with fuel injection that had a pump in the tank and one in the frame up closer to the fuel injectors.

It sounds like a bad wire.Also,working on big trucks for years,there are lots of electrical things that wont work if there is a bad ground.On old cab overs when you started having weird problems and the engine wouldnt start,if you cleaned the ground terminals that were outside of the cab in the weather,it would usually fix it.

In this case I wouldnt know what wire it is,but its kind of telling you its a wire somewhere if you hit a bump and it gets better or worse.I remember I had to weld a wire on the part of the tank that had the fuel gauge on it,or the part that goes into the tank,to hook a ground wire to, on my Chevy pickup when I put the new fuel pump in.

Or it could be a line,like others said.Since it kind of is like it was before the pump was changed,it sure sounds like a wire connection someplace to me.

Too bad it wouldnt be too easy to hook another fuel pump to it like the old Buick was.If you had a pump that would pump enough pressure,you could put it on there and wire it to a toggle switch.If it quit on you,flip the toggle switch and keep on trucking.

Only if my son and daughter come back home and help me out LOL. But not sure I could handle having the daughter kids around 3 sons and a daughter so yep my grand kids and they might be a hand full to keep out of my shop and all

I had a pickup that ran like that several years ago. It ended up being a sheet metal screw in the gas tank that would plug the intake. After it would set for a while the screw would fall off and it would run fine till it got picked up and would shut the fuel off. It drove me nuts. I could blow the line out and there was no blockage or leaks. It would sometimes stop in less than a mile and the the next time it would run fine for a week or two. Then when I had to be some where on time it would stop on me.

Fred P............