mint

hi, I have an 88 NA GXL that has been having a very frustrating problem lately. Engine-related mods on the car are intake, full racing beat exhaust, jacobs rotary pro pak electronic iginition, air pump removed (dual belt pulley now), upgraded clutch.



My issue is that at times, the car will drastically lose power, sometimes for an extended period of time. when this happens, the idle usually drops a bit, the exhaust note gets much worse (louder, more raspy, not clean like it should be), and it almost sounds like there is air escaping from somewhere it shouldnt :/ When it is doing this, if I rev it up it will sometimes make popping noises from the exhaust, like it is misfiring or something.



I just replaced the spark plugs which seemed to help the car a bit overall, but this problem still persists. One of the possible causes I can think of, even though I dont want to, is that this could this mean that my apex seals are going? My father and I are the original owners and the car only has 64k miles on it, so I dont know if they start to get bad that early or not. I do know for a fact that the car is running pretty rich at the moment, but am not sure if this could be a contributing factor to the power loss problem.



What is very strange is that if it were a large problem with the engine, I would think that it would stay constant and always experience this lack of power..however, it will suddenly work *perfectly* again for somewhat extended periods of time as well. I just can't seem to identify any sort of pattern to when this problem occurs. Any help anyone can give would be greatly appreciated...even if you could just point me in the right direction of things to check that may be contributing to this.



Thanks, and let me know if any further info is required, and I will do my best to provide it.

RicerJ

has the been acting strange in anyway before you did the mods?

ShadowboyM

check you coils, i had that same problem on my car i was revvin it one day a few times then had major power loss i thought i popped a rotor but with the car running i pulled the leading coils from the wires to the coils and shocked my self twice, then i pulled the wires on the leading coils to check that and got nothing at all. i wet my finger and even stuck it in the coils and grounded myself but nothing at all.

j9fd3s

unfortunately its intermittant, but try bypassing the jacobs

mint

thanks for the replies...except for the spammers :/ I actually ended up taking the car into a mazda dealership to get the right rear ball joint looked at (and subsequently replaced) the other day and they found that the fuel pulse dampener was bad as well. I'm going ahead and having both replaced and we'll see what improvement, if any, the fuel pulse dampener may have on this issue. If it still persists, then I'll take a look at the coils and/or bypass the jacobs.



A friend of mine also said that this issue could be related to a sort of fail-safe mode the car switches into if it for some reason thinks that it is running too lean and heading toward detonation...he said it will cut power back and force the engine to run richer...however, I have never heard of such a thing. I could just be uninformed, but if anyone has any other thoughts on this...by all means shoot them my way

mint

oh and as a response to ricerj, the car was running fine before any mods as well as a good while (1-2 years) after all of the aforementioned mods were installed.

Ryan123

Pull the codes. Oh BTW NEVER go to the dealership they will F you for everything. Always start with pulling the codes then go from there.



S4 code check



Might seem like a lot to do just to get them but, once you do it, its done and if you plan on having the car longer you WILL need it.