engine and drivetrain Odd Running Behavior.

[mike472]

I had a similar problem with the car just dying on me all of a sudden and going under the hood, jiggling wires on the coil and making sure everything was connected.  It would just restart for no apparent reason like nothing was ever wrong. The gauges were jumpy too whenever I turned on my lights or hit the brakes.  One day the starter acted up and it was brand new.  Put a jumper cable between battery ground and engine block and presto, the starter works again.  Battery was  good but the original flat braided ground cable that  goes into the battery clamp was looking brittle.  I started to bend it and found that most of the fine wiring was hanging on by a thread and just broke right off.  It looked connected, but it really wasn't, electrically speaking.  Replacing the engine to battery and battery to body ground cables ended this intermittent pain in the ass problem.  It also cured the jumpy guages for the most part.  Sometimes it pays to look for the simple stuff. This could be your problem.  Clean the block connection good if you replace that cable.  Best thing was, it cost about $12 in cables at Pep Boys to fix it.

[KFunk]

ahhh, weird.  Dizzy cap is always what i'm thinking could be a problem, but it never ends up being that.  I probably have 2 or 3 extra perfectly fine dizzy caps laying around that I've pre-emptively replaced, which never did the trick.

[eurotrash]

Coil and tuning the carbs really made a difference in MPG. On today's trip, I got 245 miles out of 8.1 gallons of 93 octane, when I topped it off for the trip home.

Previously, it was 200 to a tank.

Interesting.