yup that's what stabbing the dizzy is.

 

:shocked: Wow that's rough.

Welcome to the forum. Chiltons manuals are the worst. Haynes manuals are a little better. What you really need is the shop manual for your car. You can find them at www.helminc.com and sometimes on ebay.

 

I ran the car for a bit this morning and listened intenly and here is what I came up with:

The engine idles just fine when it is at idle. Every once in a while when I hit the gas the engine surges a little bit and doesn't come down in RPM's until I tap the gas again and let go. When I pit my hand over the carb, I couldn't feel any air coming out. Regarding the misfire/backfire, I can count it like clockwork at idle, it is very regular, about every 2.5 seconds. Little puffs of whiteish smoke come out of the carb sometimes too, doesn't really seem to follow a pattern when that happens. No hard starting, she fires up pretty quickly. Anyone have a good idea of what this could be?

 

So, you can be an *** on the forum to a newbie all you want, but if you actually CALL someone an ***, that's bad. Hmmm.....

Interesting rules we gots goin' on here.

 

So..do you have a problem with the rules?

 

Did I say that?

I just said they were..... interesting.

 

George?

 

I thought the same thing when I first seen this post

 

we are not laughing with you, just at you

 

go easy on the guy, we all had to learn some way, my dad learned the same way this guy did, by reading a book, back in the 1960's, and i got the easy way by having him teach me, so either way you have to learn, and luckily for him, he chose here, since this is by far the most knowledgable group of people you could find on corvettes.

On the tech side, if this just started happening, i would look at fuel, change your filter, while this might be simple, i have seen way to many times where backfiring can be attributed to this. So give this a try and if it doesnt work, post again. Stick with and dont abandon here, just cuz people are giving you a rought time.

 

I won't pretend to be the expert many on this forum are but I will go ahead and tell you what I would/test in your scenario.

It sounds as if you have a fairly consistant miss (2.5 seconds) although it is a little hard to say still not being able to hear it. The surge is probably a choke setting problem or a minor vacuum leak, probably unfortunately unrelated. If it is indeed a consistant miss it should be pretty easy to figure out which cylinder is the culprit. Still didn't mention if the miss existed when you got the car or if it developed later, like after a run into the Redline? Given you just replaced the plugs checking them now individually one by one, the missing cylinder should look different than the rest in that it will either look dirtier (black and sooty) or may be clean and wet depending on whether it is fireing at all. Assuming we pull the plugs one by one and find the culprit we need to then still determine the root cause. It would be likely either electrical or mechanical as being a carburated engine it wouldn't only effect a single cylinder. If it were electrical it could be a bad plug wire or a bad or dirty distributor cap. If a mechanical problem I would say you have an intake valve/seat problem. On the electrical side (much cheaper) you should just go ahead and replace the cap and rotor if you haven't done so already and then test to see how it runs. Wires wouldn't be a bad idea either although they will cost you more than the cap and rotor and great care must be taken to replace them in the correct corresponding locations or you may induce an engine fire or muffler spliting backfire like you have never heard;-) Moving on----

Electrical:
Say you have found a nasty looking plug and the others still look good I would first suspect a spark plug wire, examine the suspect wire in detail, you may well find it burned somewhere, pinched or otherwise damaged which would cause it to ground short of reaching the plug hence sparking of the fuel discharge. If you found two bad looking plugs follow each wire to see where they may intersect and could be shorting accross to each other. Either buy or borrow another wire to test with replacing it to see if it rperhaps resolves the problem. If not I would then lean toward the cap and rotor if not already replaced. If alll this is good, we have demonstrarted we have a healthy blue spark to the plug we have to consider the problem may be mechanical.Coils go bad as well but usually have a different symptom(s). Points in he distributor can do this as well but I think your year may not have them anymore (check). Moving on

Mechanical:

The white smoke you mentioned can only be channelled back up through the carburator via an intake valve. Testing this involves getting the piston at TDC (Top Dead Center) on the suspect cylinder and performing "leakdown" test to see how where injected compressed air escapes the cylinder bore. This will require equipment you are unlikely to have as well as experience. Another way you can test this is to purchase or borrow a compression tester, follow the directions and test all you cylinders to find where and how much differentiation you have in air pressure between all your cylinder bores. This will identify any problematic cylinder for further investigation. This will require the assistance of a buddy to turn over the engine (coil wire off) while you log test results via the guage. Will take you a while to get through it doing all the steps right and will also neccesitate the valve covers be removed as well. This is where fingers start to get dirty and repair bills more expensive.

Check out the plugs and let us know what you find

Good luck
-Andre

 

If you rules that are....um....not so interesting, I suggest you mail them to Upper Level Managment.