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Start with the simple stuff. If you haven’t done it already, pull the sockets off the bulbs and look for corrosion in the terminals. White or green corrosion can play all kinds of tricks at the sockets alone. According to my wiring diagram, both ground wires for the right side headlights are black. If you know how to jumper a wire, jumper either black wire to a clean ground and look for the lights to start working. Just focusing on that lo beam alone, it might just be time to change it. Filaments can break and still maintain just enough contact to give you intermittent operation.
Your issue with the hi beams not holding makes me think that you’ve got a bad multi function switch. If you can’t feel or hear the normal snap when you do switch from the lo to hi beams, the switch likely broke internally.
You show up expecting answers and the only thing you tell us is a light comes on sometimes. That being said, the only way to move forward is you communicate something more useful in terms of symptoms to the people on this website or you go and find a way to provide some codes. That’s the only way anybody can help you. Given your attitude, you’re going to the dealer to pay 60 bucks to read codes. Good luck with that.
Get codes pulled and report them back here. That’s gonna help everybody move forward much faster. With or without the ABS light on, there will probably be codes stored in history.
I’d want to throw an expensive scan tool at it that can access and show you the misfire counter. GM was a little lackluster with the P030X codes back then but their misfire counter was always spectacular. If there’s a chance you know somebody who’d trust you with their scan tool, get your hands on it and look at that misfire counter to see if you can narrow down a particular offending cylinder. If that same scan tool has the counter, it should also have the injector kill test. You can use that as your cylinder contribution test.
I do like you chasing the distributor as a potential problem. An easy thing to look at would be the cam retard offset if you can get that scan tool. That can give you an idea where the timing is without pulling things apart. IIRC, the offset shouldn’t be more than 10-12°. I could be wrong, but that’s still a reasonable range. If you also happen to have code P1345 stored, you could probably just throw in a new distributor blindly and come out a winner.
If I’ve made sense of what you’ve written, and I’m not sure I have, you’ve possibly got a back feeding problem due to a bad ground circuit. Get all your external turn signal bulbs plugged back in as they’re not helping to be out of their sockets at this point. I think, realistically, you need a voltmeter, a good jumper wire, and some wiring diagrams to do some voltage drop testing on the ground circuits.
If you saw me try to get through a day in real life, you’d understand. 😀
If you can’t laugh, I can’t help you.
Never reuse a gasket on the differential cover, It’s just a paper gasket and it’s going to break apart when you remove the cover anyway. You should be able to reuse the gaskets at the axle flanges if they’re metal seals. Reuse them all you want as long as they’re not heavily seeping or flat out leaking gear lube through them. Always clean all your mating surfaces where you’re going to use any gaskets. (Same goes for any reusable gaskets.) Make sure to cover up the differential any way you can while you’re cleaning up the gasket surfaces for the diff cover. Since you don’t like RTV, don’t use it. But do clean those gasket surfaces.
Your spark plugs were due to be changed at 110K. If you don’t know if or when they’ve ever been changed, it’s a good place to start diagnosing. Just remove them, visually inspect them and, if possible, measure the gaps out on them. The specified gap is .039 to 043 inches or 1.0 to 1.1 millimeters. If the gaps are a lot wider than that, you can just use it as an indicator that the plugs are worn out.
Just by listening to the first video alone, I’d say your lug nuts didn’t get tightened well enough or the aluminum oxide buildup on the hub isn’t letting the wheel seat correctly to the hub when you do tighten the lug nuts. Take that wheel back off and clean that white corrosion off the wheel hub and do the same to the wheel itself with a wire wheel. Then check to make sure you didn’t damage the wheel itself. You’re going to look at the holes to make sure that they’re not egged out and look for evidence of the wheel stud threads cutting into the holes. If those holes are egged out, the wheel is now junk. If it’s not damaged, get all that corrosion cleaned off before you reinstall it and get a torque wrench to torque the wheels to 80 ft lb.
Thank you. As soon as I read that, I had no clue why I didn’t consider that to be a possibility from the start. I chose the right screen name! I found the right specs elsewhere and the magic number was 106 inch pounds.
Not to discount the possibility of an injector shutting down a PCM, but I can say for sure a ground fault can cause all kinds of problems with any car. I recall a 96 Nissan Altima that had a no start once just because a battery ground was just bolted to the wrong place on the block. I diagnosed a 98 Dodge once that had a wiring harness burnt onto the exhaust manifold. It burned away the loom and the PCM ground wire within. The wire slowly rubbed away at the same time on the exhaust manifold allowing the PCM wire to use the manifold as a new ground until the wire eventually broke. I showed my customer by grounding that burnt wire on the exhaust to get it running again. I had a bad ground once on an 02 Buick LeSabre cause a hand full of codes after I changed the engine in it. I didn’t see that most of the strands were broke at the ring terminal and that was enough to affect a lot of sensor inputs and give me one unhappy customer that was sure we sold him a junk engine.
I know Scanner Danner has a good video on his YouTube channel that shows early GM fuel injectors being chronic failure parts. I think it was for a 1st generation 3.1 litre engine but I remember all of GM’s early fuel injectors were failure prone. Find it and watch it if you can. You might be onto something yet.
@ the OP, when your mechanic said it’s blowing fuses, did he mean that it’s repeatedly blowing the fuse for the AC compressor circuit or is it blowing fuses that power other circuits as well? If it’s blowing fuses that power other circuits, then I’d consider a short to ground in the circuit somewhere before the compressor. Otherwise, the coil in the compressor itself could very well have shorted out too. What I saw of the wiring diagram showed that the AC compressor circuit also powers the rear defrost and the electronic ride control which means there’s more than one way for this circuit to possibly be shorted out. I think a real easy thing to do for yourself is to do a visual inspection of the wiring harness. Most of the short circuits I’ve diagnosed lately have been due to a harness getting burnt on exhaust components. Even if I’m wrong, looking is free. If you’re in a rural area, look for evidence of rodents eating on wires too.
Year, make, model, and engine size please. My first wild guess at it for now would be a control valve of some type for a variable intake runner system.
I don’t know how to call this one. They hired a tech to become the fourth tech a couple months ago. On his first day, talked a lot. Of course, there was plenty of face time with his phone in between otherwise incessant and unwanted conversations. The second day, he managed not to talk so much, but was already asking me to loan him my tools. He didn’t start small as he hit me up for the $500 hydraulic brake line tool kit. He dragged two carts and a long & large Mac tool box you could almost live in but he’s already looking to borrow tools. When I shot him down, he whined, “I see how it is.” so I’m guessing one of the other techs suggested I might loan him the kit. The other two techs I work with are good kids so they’re always welcome to borrow my tools. The day two jabber jaw is not. Anyway, he then disappears for two weeks allegedly to a flu. I thought he was already terminated for job abandonment because he started not calling in to report he was still sick. But he got one more day where he came in and said that he was still sick and he threw up before coming to work. He got a half day out of that and then he was fired. So roughly 2.5 days in roughly 2.5 weeks. I don’t think I’m allowed to tell you about the guy before him. He only made it about a month and I think he’s responsible for some power steering fluid in a master cylinder.
For future reference, the symptoms you’ve been trying to diagnose probably could have been figured out with a leak down test. A cylinder leakage tester can be rented/loaned from most parts stores and you’d just need an air compressor to operate the tester. In your case, you would have wanted to do your testing with the engine already hot since the car seems to need a half hour to start overheating. The leak might have sealed up on a cold cranking compression test whereas the heat of normal driving expands something well enough to open a leak back up. It could have gotten past the blue stuff too if you’re only testing the car at idle. Low combustion pressures at idle may not have been enough to push past a mild gasket leak. Another thing you could have done was to read your spark plugs while you had them out for compression testing. The color of your coolant can faintly show up on your spark plugs if it’s getting into the cylinders.
If you want to change the water pump at this point, you shouldn’t fear it if you’ve already got the head off too. You would have had to pull the timing belt for the head anyway so now the water pump is easy pickings.
You guys already nailed most of the ones I would bitch about. Dishonorable mention goes to the GM 4.2s in the Trailblazers/Envoys. It’s not an impossible filter to pull, but you will usually take an oil bath down your arm. Then there’s any oil filter that the last lube monkey managed to tighten down to the point you need a breaker bar and a friend to spin it free.
Otherwise, this is a good place to not only hate on the oil filters, but the cars that have shielding under the engine that requires two or three different tools to unfasten. Many late model European cars and newer Ford Fusions come to mind. It’s like they design the screws to seize and/or rust right out of the factory. Then they recess the plastic pins so you can’t get your removal tools under them.
[quote=”SantanaTV” post=173133]The most pain in the ass filters that I’ve found so far are the 3.7L Chryslers. You have no room to do anything. Drives me crazy.[/quote]
For the 3.7’s, that definitely going to be a Dodge Nitro and, IIRC, the Jeep Liberty is its counterpart. The Nitro is even worse than the Liberty because the Nitro has a big fat sway bar in the way as well.