1995 Camaro

[wxo]

I've heard of glass packs before, but not nut packs.

[Fred32v]

If the EPA finds out about this,
they'll want all cars to have scented exhaust.

[TheRookie]

Did you hear the one about the polish squirrel that wanted to blow up a car??

[MostMint]

took the exhaust off and shook some stuff out:



the clean ones were in the frame

[Basement Paul]

That's just nutty! (I couldn't help myself)

-BP

[GMJohnny]

CAJUN!!!

[markss327]

Have you given any thoughts to a 'barn cat'?????
Natures very own chipmunk eliminator, via the food chain.

[MostMint]

I forgot to mention the big chunks are actually part of the catalytic converter. A couple years back I heard it (the part that does the converting) rattling around in the cat. Then it stopped. I had hoped it went out the back but I guess not. Who knows how much performance that was costing me, but the nut case helped me find it.

[MostMint]

It's only been about 4 years since the 2nd gear synchros went. Now it is starting to have problems going into 1st. After sitting idling in neutral I can't get it to go to first a fair amount of the time. It'll downshift just fine so far, but the writing is on the wall.

Now I am looking for a good used 5 speed tranny for a Camaro or Firebird.

[wxo]

I found this on our local Craigslist:

http://raleigh.craigslist.org/pts/1198935668.html

I'll be in your neck of the woods at the end of July.

[MostMint]

After the melee with the house furnace motor and replacing the Lumina gas tank, I finally am got to the business of replacing the transmission in this car. I found a used one at a junk yard for $300+tax. It probably took about 5 hours to do the whole jobs, not sure cause there were some breaks during the job, but I got it done on a Saturday and drove it to BP's annual poker game.

There is some bad news here too. With all this snow I noticed some green drops on the driveway. It took a little while to pinpoint it since I did not smell anything. After driving it in the slop I put it in the garage yesterday and ran the furnace to dry it off. Today I put cardboard under there and let it run. The green stuff was dripping out the exhaust where the cat and the tailpipe join. To me this means the head gasket is going again. Argh. That job was a pain in the butt.

Right now I am going to drive it and hope it lasts til spring, then Kurt and I will have a project. I have a spare engine, so either I pull this one out and have the block and heads milled, or I put the spare engine in there. IIRC it had under 90k on it.

Also the blinker switch is going and the low oil light keeps coming on. I've replaced the switch already once (low volume not low pressure - pressure is good on the gauge).

This car is now 15 years old and starting to show it.

[MostMint]

Knock on wood the car is still running. Last week I added a little water to the radiator and put the GM stopleak tablets in it. The overflow canister had the same amount of water as when I first noticed the water coming out the exhaust. I'll monitor the radiator level now too.

This is bizarre because sometimes I see the green drops in the snow and sometimes I don't. And it has yet to run on 5 cylinders due to the water fouling out the plug.

Oh and I fixed the low oil light by adding a quart of oil - high tech repair

[GMJohnny]

Now that you have it all fixed up, SELL IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[MostMint]

So the car behaved fine the rest of the winter then started sitting for the summer. One day I had to drive it to pick up something and man did it run like crap! I drove it a couple more times and it got a little better but it was still missing. I tried fresh gas to no avail. Then I started getting more serious. There were several codes in the computer indicating several sensors were bad. I cleared the codes and the 24 crank position sensor came up. It is located behind the harmonic balancer. I have a spare 3.4 so I pulled the sensor from there. The problem persisted. Then I went for the cam position sensor. Reading the Haynes book the symptoms I had matched the description - occasional misfire/backfire - since the cam position sensor helps refine the ignition timing. I broke the sensor coming out of the spare so I bought one. Again no dice. So I did some digging and learned the 24x sensor is for under 2000 RPMs and the 3x crank position sensor is for higher RPMs. Again pulled the sensor from the spare and put it in the car. Denied again.

Along the way here I read something from another 3.4 owner that said he had a bad exhaust cam lobe. That scared me for a while but I doubted this was the problem, mostly because when the car was ice cold it would not miss at all. Once it warmed up it would start missing - sometimes just cruising along it would pop.

Today I decided it the plug wires were next. They were quite old. I could not get how they could be bad since the car ran good ice cold and always idled OK. Lo and behold the problem is cured! There is a bundle of wires that run to sensors that were right below the wires as they came off the coils - undoutbtedly transferring power to the sensor wires and tripping computer codes galore!

The question is why the thing did not miss for the first minute?

[MostMint]

The latest round of work on the old Camaro was echeck related. The catalytic converter inners blew out quite a ways back, but it passed twice without them. This time it failed the first try. So I went to the old standby of cleaning the EGR valve. It wasn't very dirty and cleaned up quite easily with a wire brush. This is the electronic kind with three little valves. Put in a couple cans of dry gas for good measure but it passed with ease.

The only snafu in the whole process was one of the wires broke when I removed the connector from the EGR. Luckily there was enough left I could splice it back together.

Ho hum. The Blizzak treaded beast rolls on!