The other day I was driving my '81 vette home when it suddenly stalled on me. I had battery power to the car, the starter would crank but there was no boom to make the car go.

I just had new spark plugs, wires, gaskets, timing and carburetor tuned on the top end. I'm running an Edelbrock 1405 carb (about 1.5 years old and rebuilt about 300 miles ago). I visually confirmed that fuel is making it into the carburetor when I step on the gas.

This happened on a cold and rainy day (~30 F). The second time this happened it was just cold. I could feel a little buffeting coming from the engine minutes before it went out on me.

My thought is maybe the distributor since the carburetor, and electricity appear to be good. Thoughts?

 

So you DID verify you have spark at each cylinder?

My first thought was spark. Perhaps the little wires in the distributor cap that go to the module ....and sometimes break off from the little movement or corrosion inside. But IDK what kind of dist you're running either. I had a late 80's pick-up years ago where it would run foul in cold humid weather. What it turned out to be was a cracked "star" on the distributor shaft below the cover inside the distributor. It would die after a while in cold weather but start back up when it cooled down. It was a tricky one to ID but eventually looking at it, one of the corners of the 8 point star broke off in my fingers. My guess is warm temps in the distributor would flake it out??

On the fuel side, I'm kind of at a loss. if it dies and starts up in a minute or two, I wonder if it could be water or moisture in your gas? You say it was below freezing when it happened. What I've had happen is water droplets freeze up on the inside of the veturies and eventually block or reduce airflow or screw up air/fuel. What you can do to perhaps ID this is when it happens next time and starts cutting out, pull over, stop, get out right away and look down into your carb for ice. Due to the heat of the carb any ice build-up melts pretty quick so you have to look right away. If you let it idle for a minute the ice will probably have dropped off. Another possiblility is water in the tank freezes and creates an ice block, prevents gas from flowing. I'm just tossing ideas out here. Doesn't sound like you have any of the computerized sensors on your car that could be fouling things up. Do you have a heat riser vent coming off the exhaust manifold to a breather snorkel?

Is the security system hooked up or bypassed?

 

No spark at the cylinders. I used a voltmeter on the plugs as a friend turned the engine over and then I just took the wires off and felt no shock from the distributor. Maybe a power issue? I have the top end of the distributor and I'm performing some forensics now.

The heat riser vent is removed and it's worked without that with no problem. I'm not exactly sure if the security system is still hooked up or not, but I'm going to assume no.

 

Here's what I found underneath the distributor caps. The leads are a little corroded and look like they might have a problem? Then again, this is my first time working in this area so I have an untrained eye.

 

Probably your '81 distributor's been changed as well as carb.
Remove Rotor then take a couple pics looking into top of dist ... post

I suspect an issue with power To dist at BATT+ ... should be ~ 12-13v when key On.

Or ... issues with Coil / Module / Pickup ... each is relatively inexpensive.

Post pics so we can better determine Which distributor you have.

 

As mentioned "star" is reluctor and quite rare it breaks without being tampered with ... pickup surrounds reluctor and has "teeth" which correspond with star reluctor ... 8 points on star for a V8 ... 6 points for a V6.

 

I'm running and Edelbrock 1405 carb on there - I'm not too sure on the distributor though. There's a whole mess of things that I've found on this car that I need to go back and clean up (Exhibit A: Drill bits plugging unused vacuum hoses).

I got it to fire up today and it ran pretty well (sunny and 75 here in Texas). So my thought here, is it possible this is a choke issue? Long story short, the choke kept bothering me (seemed like it had a mind of it's own) until I realized that one of the grounds wasn't plugged in. Before I plugged it in, the engine never stalled on me. Once I plugged it in, I maybe got one 40 minute drive with no problems. But as soon as the cold weather hit, it stalled on me while driving. It was also 30 degrees and I had a cold engine while I tried diagnosing the stalled engine. I wasn't even looking at the choke at the time so it's possible that I could have completely overlooked this issue. I took a picture of the grounding wire in picture 3 (The wire below the red one). Thoughts?


Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 3

Picture 4