I took the truck in this morning to another mechanic. Maybe he can find what is wrong. I was looking for professional advice this weekend, so I called my uncle. He is a Chevrolet nut. Though not a professional mechanic, he knows a little something about engines. He has built his own race cars for the last 20 years. Currently he is building a mid-80s Chevy S10 race truck for his girlfriend.
After describing my symptoms to him the other day on the phone, he simply said, “When you figure it out, let me know. I have a truck that is doing the exact same thing and I can’t figure out what is going on.” Wow, that was encouraging.
I seriously suspect the computer, as does my uncle.
It is having a fuel issue. It acts like a delivery problem, but it is not that. It is not getting proper mixture and therefore it has no power. Sensors, computers, intake valves, etc. can be causing the problem. Whatever it is, it is telling the computer that the mixture is not right between fuel and air.
The mechanic I took it to this morning says he has it pinned. At 11:00 he said that he had replaced a horribly carbonated gasket that seals off the intake manifold. It was leaking air into the wrong spots. Which then caused the air/fuel mixture to be wrong. Sounds reasonable.
When I was there at 11:00 he said that he had already taken it on a test drive and it ran great. He was waiting for it to cool back down so that he could run the diagnostics on it again to see if there was something else he could charge me for. He was going to run it again after it cooled.
I went back there at 2:00 and he said that it was still cooling. Huh? 3 hours to cool? He said he would call me at 3:00 with the truck ready to go.
I am crossing my fingers that this really was the problem or that he will find it and fix it quickly. My only hesitation is that I have been told by 3 other mechanics that they have tracked down and fixed the problem. When I took it back to them they said there was no longer a problem. Hmmm.