Normy

Remember that scene in "Poltergeist" where the little girl says "They're...back!"

Uhm, it applies to me. Something is back...

I had a high throttle miss for quite some time. It progressively got worse, and eventually I even had some missing at cruise speeds. Turns out it was a bad plug wire.

Nology wires purchased and installed; problem solved.

But just like the infamous spirits in the famous '80's movie, the problem has returned...kinda. Right after I put the Nology wires on, I had to take the shark for a late night run to feel the newfound power. Oh boy did she pull hard! But near the end, with the engine wailing, I felt a sudden sharp miss and heard a backfire. Whereas before it felt like a cylinder or two was dropping off temporarily, this was a complete ignition shut-down for a split second.

I didn't know what to think. I had plans to take the car down for a day or two to fix a minor oil leak [which I did...] and change the caps and rotors, so I didn't have a chance to drive the car around and attempt to find out under what circumstances the miss occured. I also hoped that all the moving around and messing with stuff under the hood might cause it to go away...or that maybe the whole thing was just one of those "one-time-things" that are so common with older vehicles.

Well, over the past 3 days I've been driving it and it has been treating me like a diaper. If I accelerate hard, it will eventually do this miss [nearly throwing me against the window!]. Another symptom cropped up last night- Under light acceleration, with the tach swinging through 1600 RPM, it will almost always give me this miss. Occasionally, when starting out from a stop, it will miss and one one occasion when backing out of a spot at the grocery store it actually stalled!

-I don't think temperature has anything to do with it.

-It started after I put the new plug wires on.

Anyone had this before? Any ideas as to where to start? I'm assuming that I have a wire that is making intermittent contact/losing contact somewhere, and this is causing the ignition to cut out. At least I think it is an ignition problem....during my hard run the first night when it missed I heard a good backfire, which I suppose is saying that fuel was making it to the cylinder [light aircraft recip engines are always shut down by cutting off fuel just for this reason].

Well...any help would be appreciated!

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Normy!

'85 S2 5 speed

Normy

And just to add fuel to the fire...

I went downtown tonight, to shake my little rear at the clubs. And of course, turning left onto onto Orange Avenue, I noticed a bunch of kids with their various camaro's and Mustangs parked while they huddled and chatted.

Needing to display a small amount of V8 Porschism, I decided to "hammer it" up to the 35 mph speed limit. Heh- there's still some kid in me...

BUT of course my "poltergeist" has a sensor that tells it when the worst time to crop up is. Sure enough, a whole eve of driving around to various clubs resulted in perfect running, with this particular exception...

I've seen copy machines with similar properties. These are maintained by strange guys with lots of tools and no personalities....but from what I've heard they are generally mechanical exorcists-

N O R M Y !

'85 S2 5 speed