Despite my best efforts to find my mysterious skip, I have all but failed at this point.

Car does not skip when cold and only intermittently upon warm up, I've hooked up a scan tool and have found no codes in the computer to point me to which cylinder..or even which bank of cylinders. someone told me to check the coils, but what should the #'s be on a multimeter? I have also thought about checking the injectors maybe they are dirty?? If the coils are not firing wouldn't that trip a trouble code?? I will be cleaning the spark plugs and (hopefully) fixing the problem this weekend.

In case I don't make it back here please respond here and e-mail me with ideas: teacherspouse@hotmail.com

Thanks,
Jon

 

Post back to this message and we can give information.

 

I have put fuel injector cleaner in the gas and sucked some seafoam into a vacuum line to try and clean the intake system. This helped some but the car is still skipping. Haven't pulled the spark plugs out but am going to do that this afternoon.

Thanks

 

No luck cleaning the plugs, still skipping. I have thought about checking the coils but I don't know how to do that and I can't afford the $70 they want to hook it up to the scanner.

 

Cleaning plugs is not effective anymore. Best bet is replacement. Pull the coils and look at the boots for any cracks or any spots that look like spark been arcing through to the head. The boots are not as expensive as the coils and more boots fail than coils. You can go around the car while it is running and unplug the coils one at a time until the unplugged coil has no effect on the engine. That is your bad clinder. When you pull a coil plug on a good cylinder, it will miss a lot worse.

 

ok I still have a skipping problem. I have replaced all the plugs, and boots, no help. The only thing that I have found that helps is spending about 45 minutes on the interstate. We take a road trip about every other month, it takes 3.5 hours to get to my in-laws and we spend a weekend there before driving 3.5 hours home. After about 45 minutes on the way down it will quit skipping and run fine for the rest of the trip and about 3-4 days after we get home.
It doesn't seem to be fuel related though because we use fuel from several different stations around town and it little difference (although it skips less on Chevron and Shell fuels it does still skip, yes I have used multiple (5)tanks from the same Chevron station).
This makes no sense to me, anyone got any ideas??

 

Can you get a reading from the engine coolant sensor and post them? It is possible the sensor is reading wrong causing a bad fuel mixture. A slow O2 sensor may cause that also. And possibly a hung EGR valve.