Alright I'm gonna drive down to columbus tomorrow, to check out the 83' Turbo. After talking to the guy he claims that one day after he came out of work it was running oddly, he limped it home he said. Right now from what I'm told, is that the car will fire right up from cold, and idle but it seems to have a surge to it. He also said that it starts to stumble when you start to give it throttle, he said as it warms up it seems to start running more correctly. Any thoughts on what to look for? I'm gonna pull the plugs, check those out. Make sure the distributor has all of it's connections correctly and everything. He thinks it might be the fuel pump. Any advice you guys can provide would be appreciative.

 

I am sure there is alot to check out on the car but sense it IS a turbo check the rubber vacuum line running to the wastegate to make sure its not cracked or rotted, it shouldn't affect the car until it's making boost but its one of the things I would check just because. However I would check all the other vacuum lines and those little sensor connectors that seem to be everywhere on these cars...and just for kicks and giggles make sure the lighter works and all the fuses are in the car and in working order....Make sure it has fresh gas in it or gas period..oil...tranny fluid...um...make sure the air filter is there and not clogged or at least nothing is clogging the intake before the throttle body...make sure all the clamps are tight on the intake hoses and that the hoses are not loose....look for water in the radiator..check the fan clutch..fan shroud, if there is an IC make sure it has no visible cracks...thats all I can think of right at the moment.

 

From what I've learned with my fuel pump going bad, the engine tends to run bad after it warms up, not during the warm up or while it is cold, unless the fuel pump is uber gone then it tends to have problems the whole time except for idling the beginning part.

Good luck.

 

By surge does he mean kinda of a bucking when accelerating? Anyway check the Sparkplugs and wires as that coused a similar problem with my car.

 

It's unlikely to have an intercooler, since they didn't come with one from the factory. Most likely he's got more than one bad sensor or corroded connection and possibly a bad fuel pressure regulator.

 

Alright so I checked out the car, the body of it is in pretty good shape, the transmission and oil are good. The interior is all pretty clean save for a few cracks in the dash. Everything works, even the A/C. The car starts up and idles fine. The problem seemed to be that the car would seem to backfire around 3000rpms. You could hear a pop since it needs a new muffler. After the car was warmed up and we got it running, it started running pretty well. You could still feel a slight cutoff once in a while, but the car was more tha capable of driving and made it up to freeway speeds with no problem. So I'm gonna buy the car and go pick it up in a few days. I'll just workout the other slight problems. Car's not been in an accident, it's got only 85k miles on it, and it has surprisingly a very very small amount of rust. There's a few little spots here and there, but nothing that can't be taken care of. Even the more common rust spots on these cars seemed to be pretty clean. The bad pressure regulator sounds like a possibility. Another thing is the guy has been putting a lot of fuel injector cleaner in the car lately, as far as I'm aware, I thought injector cleaner wasn't really very good for trying to run a car with. Another thing is he said at one point he did have to replace an injector. It never occured to me to ask if the problem happened after he replaced the injector. It's possible that it could be the wrong type of injector?

On a side note, I spotted a 280ZX sitting in a junkyard down in columbus. Wanted to go check it out, but we had places to go and people to meet. Kind of a sad sight. It even had the headlight covers, if I coulda stopped I'd have tried to grab those.