water ?

[boggs1227]

water in the gas ......

alright ...tho i have not gone outside to try to get the explorer to start i was talking to a person i know that was haveing problems and told them about mine and they said "maybe it's water " i thought to my self could it be that easy ???

my problem ,

3 months ago i was going down the road from not far from my house and i let the truck warm up and was driveing and running real good then about 20 minutes into my trip ... ( while doing 50 mph) the engine bucks twice and each time the engine cut out very brieflly each time . and before that time the truck was haveing a hard time starting and this got worse till just about a month ago ( no start condtion) .

the time just right before i could not start it i let it run for about 30 minutes in the drive way ( just to see what it would do on me ) and then the engine just cut's it's self off ( dies with no stumbling ....just off...like water is getting sucked in by the engine ) .


water ? i know it's sounds so simple of a question to ask but i just want to rule this out before spening money on another sensor that might have failed .


thanks for any comments

 

[little x]

Scott, You never said anything about water in your description. Are you talking about coolant, or rain? Was it raining when your truck stumbled? or when it cut off in the driveway after idling for thirty min?
Try your description again, with as much detail as you can put in it, because I really have no clue what your asking/implying and I don't think anyone else does either.
BTW: it's really bad for your spark plugs to just let your truck idle for an extended period of time.

 

[boggs1227]

sorry i guess... was talking about water being in the gas tank and getting water into the fuel system . the time that it cut out twice ( really quick like withen 5 seconds total time from the the first cut out ) ...not raining ...was a nice dry day and not cold or hot about 70 f .

i just replaced the spark plugs and wires just before all this happend ( i've checked them to see if it was the fault because of the hard start condtion the truck was haveing at that time )

this help ?

btw: ......i have a bad habit of going to the car wash alot and my thinking is that some how i collected a large amount of water in the tank

 

[boggs1227]

bump

i guess what i'm asking is ,do any of you think that water could cause what i described ?


no codes or cel either .

thanks .

 

[boggs1227]

bump

 

[boggs1227]

bada-bing'bada'bump

anyone?

 

[boggs1227]

ok after 60 views .i think that my question was not defined well enough....


will water ( in the fuel/gas tank ) ....cause what i described ? (sudden dieing of the engine at idle,and dieing while moveing then cuts back on )



thank you .

 

[BlakeOfDoom]

I'm in your same boat. Since I live in Sunny Socal the rain last week drenched my 91 Navajo.

I just replaced the alternator and the truck has been sitting a while, in the rain.

It was dry outside and I noticed that while driving my rpm's dropped by a grand and then went back to normal. This happened a few times. However I am really concerned since I came to a stop and the truck just died. No stumbling, no misfiring or anything, the engine just quit on me.

The truck would start right back up again, once this occurred in less than 30 seconds.

I also feel that water could be the culprit in this. I added a bottle of HEET to suck out some moisture and that hasn't seemed to help.

Oh yeah, the check engine light has not come on since this started occurring.

 

[little x]

Water will definitely cause stumble while driving. But I've never herd of water causing the engine to die completely. A car wash shouldn't get any water into the tank as long as you have your gas cap on. You don't have any holes/splits in the filler tube do you? They do make fuel additives specifically to remove water from the system. You could try draining the tank, then filling up and adding one of those additives.

And I guess, if you somehow got a ton of water in there, it could cause the engine to die completely. Your engine can't run on water and spark, it needs gas and spark. So if the injectors are spraying nothing but water into the cylinders then your truck definitely won't run.

Fast Edit: Leaving your truck sitting for long periods of time (especially with an empty tank) can cause condensation (water) to form inside the tank and watering down your gas. that is why Stabil (sp) is on the market, and why they recommend always storing a vehicle with a full tank of gas (less air in the tank to form condensation).

 

[Verno]

water

Boggs I had been waiting for some of the better known experts to chime in. Only thing I remember about car washes dealt with moisture in/on distributor caps. I wouldn't be concerned with car wash causing it unless you did a serious pressure wash of the motor. Water in your fuel could cause it to die, but generally the qty of water in fuel is low enough to just run like sh-t until cleared up. Easy to diagnose, get som HEET but befr you add it to fuel tank get a clear bottle/glass and disconnect fuel line, turn on ignition to run fuel into your bottle. Let this stand for abot 30 minutes and you can see if there is any water in the fuel!

 

[BlakeOfDoom]

could the problem possibly lie in the fuel filter? I figure after a few solid days of rain (plus the fact that I do not know how old the filter is) I'm wondering if this could be a cause of my troubles.

 

[boggs1227]

the time that the engine bucked on me twice i had a full tank and the cel did come on each time but went out after each cut-out ....the time that i let it idle in the driveway when it died on me i also had a full tank .

always the truck has started up on the first turn of the key but in the last 2 months or so it has gotten to be at least 2 turns of the key to start ( haveing to turn the motor over more to start ) .

car washes.....i know that i goto them a lot and i clean the piss out of it every time i'm there so my thinking ...that somehow my cap had either wore out or has a bad seal and every time i went i slowlly introduced water in the tank ...so moveing the truck with a big pool of water sitting in the tank was getting picked up and feed to the injectors .


i'm not a dummy per'say ...i know what water can do in fuel/engine but what i don't really have experiance with is how a certain truck engine reacts with water in the fuel( example: our explorer's) . running like crap(but still running ) would be my first thoughts as well ...but for it to be ideling at 750 rpms and purring like a kitten to just up and over shut off ...i don't know .

the fuel filter was replaced about 10 k ago ( maybe a little longer ) so idk if the filter is shot .....do these filter have a bad time with water condensation since they are metal made ?

i was first under the impression that the cam sensor was bad ..from what auto-zone told me that the truck needs it to start BUT.... after talking to someothers here with similar issues ,that the cam sensor only fine tunes the injectors or something to that effect and is not really need'ed to start it .

 

[unclemeat]

I would check the plugs and wires.

 

[BlakeOfDoom]

personally i believe the issue is fuel related. Plugs and wires are a great thing to check but I doubt they would just suddenly work then not work then work again. Electrical problems don't just come and go, they are constant.

 

[little x]

And he already said that he just replaced them.

 

[boggs1227]

tommorow i'm going to see what the hell is up ,but yeah (sigh) already replaced the plugs and wires so i'm leaning twards a fuel issue like blake said or something of that nature ....really wish i could get out there today but i got to shuttle family members around today so hopefully tommorow i may get a better idea of whats happening .

 

[unclemeat]

I bought an 04 Ranger that had a broken damaged spark plug wire from the factory. The described symptoms sound more like that than water in the fuel. Whenever I have seen water contamination in fuel the top end of the motor will tap, knock and run so poorly that you will be afraid to even let it run.

How about the IAC valve or the TPS switch.

 

[Tony H]

If you never replaced the Fuel Pump Relay, I would start there.

Water in the gas usually will give you an occassional buck and it usually happens after a recent Fill up of bad gas. For a car to stall or not start from water .. it has to be a lot of water.
Shake teh car so the gas is stirred up, Siphon some gas out and into a glass jar. see if you get water/gas separation.
Fuel pump relays go bad. Some early symptoms would be they cut out Fuel to the engine after the car has been run a while and the relay heats up.

 

[BlakeOfDoom]

I have been having experiences like this for a while now. However, today on the freeway the bucking got really bad and I ended up blowing out an oil pressure sending unit. I need to replace the sending unit.

I don't think it is related, but you never know.

i just replaced the fuel filter too. The old one had black sediment in it, and it was a little difficult to blow through, but the bucking for the most part stopped. It ran fine but then I popped the oil sender, so who knows.

 

[boggs1227]

update.... ummmm, i'll mosy likelly get started on this maybe sunday or monday ...we got a bad weather system someing our way here friday and saturday and were expected to get at 1-6 inches of snow so i don't think that getting started on it today and have it all apart is not going to be such a hot idea this second.

hopefully we'll just get some cold rain and not much of anything so i won't have to wait to long .

btw: blake .... when your's bucked did it feel like the whole truck shuddered like hitting something in the road and flying up and hitting the chassie ? thats what mine felt like ...like 2 hard bangs enough to be felt trough out the truck at least to my memory that what it felt like .