A bit of progress

Since the ICM and Coils were good we decided the next step was to replace the spark plugs and wires, which we did last Sunday.  ( I know I was slacking on updating here).  being its a fwd v6, half the plugs are easy and half are a pain.  On the first one we went to work on the wire came right out, unfortunately it was the wire and not the boot and we really hadn't pulled anything very hard.

Well that might have had something to do with the engine missing a bit.

Pulled off the boot after that and still had a bit left over.

Got that off and went about pulling the rest, and on the other side had another that did the same thing, except it was on the other side making getting the rest off a lot more difficult.

So we put in the new spark plugs, hooked up the news spark plug wires and go to fire it up, and it runs worse than before.

We accidentally swapped 2 of the wires, luckily sometime in the past someone carved the cylinder order of the coils on the hood latch, and luckily the 2 that were wrong were on the front of the engine, so just swap the wires on the coil and it fired right up and sounded better than it ever had before. Well it sounded better than it ever had before until we gave it some gas which caused it bog down and die again.

So I guess it meant we found a problem, but still had something to fix. Well we called it a day. The following day I started the car up to let it run a bit and try to see if it would do that after it warmed up. So while it was warming up I decided to run the air, cause we never removed it and it was hot outside. I have to say the air in the old 89 cutlass ciera is amazing. The old unmaintained air blows away all the new cars out there, really proves how the old no longer legal freon was way better that the current stuff.

Anyway after cooling off I thought I'd hit the gas to try and figure out how much throttle I could give the car before it started acting up. The answer not much, maybe a 10th. What was more worrying though was that after doing that a couple times it wouldn't start. I thought I'd let it cool but no good.

After it sat a few days and got rained on again I thought I would disconnect the fuel filter to see if the fuel pump was pumping anything out. So I disconnected it on Thursday, and noticed a problem. Last year when we changed the fuel filter, and because we are idiots and didn't unpressurize the system, it shot fuel all over the place we we disconnected it. This time it just leaked it out, pretty much from the pressure created by gravity created from where it leaves the fuel tank. When I cycled the battery it still shot out some fuel through the filter meaning the pump works, I reconnected it and the car started again, but when I disconnect the filter again still very little pressure, definetly not the 35-45 psi that the manual says should be there.

Well it looks to me that the pump might be on its final leg, which unfortunately would mean that we would be dropping the fuel tank soon.