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If you have fuel pressure its the opti. I have owned my 94 for 4 years now. I put more than 500 miles a week on it. I put my 3rd opti in it last week. Same symptoms every time. Runs fine for a while, dies, wait a while drive it home. One time it died, at work at lunch time. Came out to try it about every hour and a half or so. No start. Called AAA to have it hauled home. Fired it up and drove it off the roll back into the garage. Changed the opti. Ran great for another 8 or 9 months. You can check all the other stuff you want. That stuff never goes bad. I have owned a butt load of Chevys of all kinds. Many of them well over 200K miles. I have never seen a ICM go bad. I had a coil go bad in my vette symptoms were a bad miss over 3K RPM. As C4 LT1 owners, it's our lot in life. Suck it up. Change the opti.
Last edited by oilyfishhead; 09-09-2016 at 09:49 PM.
Reason: Memory recalled coil symptoms. Get off my lawn.
Well i decided to just do the Opti, dug into it Saturday while waiting for the part to show up.
a) its not nearly as bad as everyone makes it out to be. Compared to a normal SBC distributor yeah sure it sucks, but really not a big deal.
b) I have an ATI super pulley? based on the pictures does this need to come off to pull the Opti?
c) the opti is very clean compared to everything else, so guessing this one is farily new. Is there something else that causes Optis to fail more often?
Anyone know if I will have enough clearance to get the OPTi out without taking the pulley off?
I have always been able to get mine off with removing the pulley. Its quite a tight fit bit it comes off for me. I have a stock pulley so idk about your aftermarket one. Worst case scenario you can't get it off so you push it back into the seals and then pull the pulley. Not a big deal but I have never had to take my pulley off to get the opti off.
I got my new opti today so went ahead and pulled the old one off. Came off no problem with the pulley ON. The ATI pulley must be pushed forward a lot compared to stock (not sure how that works with belt alignment on everything else but it does). There is VERY little room between the front of the pulley and the cross bar/power steering rack.
Anyways, when I pulled it off, the drive shaft stayed on the engine side, but there is a new drive shaft on the new Opti. Does this just yank out? OR is it the wrong type of Opti?
Well just an update for anyone searching this later.
With the ATI pulley, they Opti comes out no problem (there really isnt space to get the pulley off easily).
Got the new Opti, put it all together and.... No change at all. Starts fine, but unless your are adding gas, it dies.
So the next day I stole the Coil/ICM off my 94, and now it runs fine. So the NEW coil OR ICM I got were bad.
Now i Have a fairly new Opti just sitting there, and a lot more experience with these cars...
Unfortunately people always blame the opti for 99% of problems on the LT1's. Look at the replies to this thread alone, a good chunk of people said opti but they were wrong. It is tough to determine the cause of an issue like you were having but my assumption of an opti going bad is a high rpm "break up". It gradually gets worse until the car won't run.
09-09-2016, 09:01 PM
