bopiela

Hey guys...

Washed the car and took for a spin today, and it didn't feel right from the get go. I didn't wash the engine bay, just to say.

At idle, redlights, in neutral, or coasting slow in first i can feel a random pulse or hard vibration. Almost feels like its under the car or from trans. Whole car seems to move/pulse. Cannot ever remember this before... Any ideas?

It's an automatic. I was shifting through gears to try and diagnose today.

Any help is greatly appreciated

harbre32

I had a similar problem a few months ago. I would describe it as a surging. I thought it was my torque converter but turned out to be a misfire. I replaced. My coil packs and plugs and it cured it. Try pushing the brake all the way in and in drive give it gas very slowly increasing the rpms ever so easy. If it Mister firing you may be able to feel it when you do this.

JJ Glo

Sounds like a misfire. Does it give you a Check Engine light? If so, drive it to an Autozone if you can and have them scan it to see which cylinder it is.

My car has done this twice since I purchased it. The first time was when I first bought the car, I washed the engine bay by spraying it down with water.....never again. The car lasted 3 days doing what you described, the whole car would shake at idle and if I gave it gas, it would shake real bad.

After some research, I took the Coil Packs out and looked inside the cylinder holes and noticed that there was some water in there. I blew it all out and dried the coil pack boots, then applied some dielectric greased to the boots and put the coil packs back on and the car was fine after that.

It did it again about a week ago, except this time it was much worse, I got the flashing Check Engine Light, so the misfire was doing damage to the catalytic converter. It did this after I had washed the car, but I only washed the outside, not the engine bay, so I didn't think it was the same issue with the coil packs and plugs being wet, but since Autozones down here in California can't scan your car by law, I decided to just take out all of the coil packs and see what was wrong. All of the coil packs and cylinders were clean, except one, cylinder 3. The coil pack boot had a bunch of dirt and was a bit wet. I cleaned the boot, blew out the cylinder hole with a compressor, then applied dielectric grease to the boot and put the coil pack back on and the car was back to normal.

bopiela

No check engine light. I'll try it out. Thanks for the input guys. Thinking about the car did feel to have less power (maybe more of a sign of a misfire?)

Shampue

Did it seems like it would die or did it die in drive when not moving?

bopiela

Kind of felt like it would die... But then I had it out this weekend and had no issues at all with it... Maybe one of my coils got wet...

wcgman

WHAT? Are you $h1tting me right now??? I mean like...what the heck is happening in Cali anymore? You guys can't own a gun to save your own life anymore, you can't let auto parts stores pull codes from your car, you get taxed out of every orifice in your body...

I love to visit Cali but the more I learn about the laws that are in effect there, the more angry I get. There's a law for everything and most of them seem pretty stupid.

Back to the original subject, the coil packs are on each cylinder then like the 05's and up and not like my 97 where there's what appears to be 2 banks (one for each side of the motor?) Is there a tool where you can see if the coil pack is firing each cylinder short of a scanner?

the5schlueters

Sometimes a misfire wont through the check engine light but there will be a code. my 3.8 has done this a couple times and it has turned out to be an injector both times. No check engine light but a misfire and lean code stored in the memory. Not saying you got a bad injector just saying that there may be a code even if the check engine light is not on. You may have to drive it for like 15 mins or so to get it to through the code but it should detect it if it misfires. I can't remember the # for the code but its like (engine running for x time and misfire detected on x cylinder).

trailor

could be a bad IAC valve. my car surged pretty hard before I finally replaced it. you can usually hear it making noise though. let it idle with the hood open and see if you hear any noises along your intake path, I could hear mine pretty clearly thru the main pipe to the filter. also, it didn't always do it at first, was an intermittent problem. later on, it was pretty consistent