Well the car is an 87 Z with a 305 tpi. The symptoms are the car runs slugishly. The rpms fluctuate alot when you are going at a slow pace. The car has some power but you can tell that its not all there. The temp gets pretty hot when you are just driving around in the city, over 220. It stalled a couple times today and it took a couple times to start it back up. Once it did it acted like it wanted to die. It has done this a couple times in the past too. The past week when I was driving it on the highway the check engine light would come on.

It does have an intake manifold leak which we will probably be fixing soon. When we took it to the shop a couple months ago the guy told us about it and you can see the dried up antifreeze. The oil looks fine and does not look milky. The car puffs white smoke sometimes when you start it. It never showed blue smoke before but some blue smoke came out today when we were trying to start it back up once it stalled and did the same last week when it stalled.

Do you guys think the manifold leak is reason for these problems? What other problems could it be? I checked for codes today but none came up.

 

Check all your plug wires... if the tack jumps around alot and the engine runs really rough, one may not be connected properly. Ask me how I know that

 

first thing is replace the gasket on the intake that is leaking that might cure alot of the problems .....another would be a complete tune up plugs, wires, cap, rotor, oil , filter- air and oil , and also check for other vacume leaks ....

 

how confident are you that your cat is not clogged Get all your general maintenance complete like the others are saying, if your problem persists I would look into getting a performance cat like a Carsound one... cuz this sound familiar of all the last 3 posts I've read and they end up being cats

 

Full tuneup was done a little while ago. We put on new MSD cap, rotor and coil along with plugs, & k&n filters. We had the cooling system completely flushed about 2 months ago and recently did the oil. I will go ahead and take out the plugs tommorow and see what I find. I will go ahead and double check the plug wires too We will probably tackle the intake gasket sometime next week. The tpi unit scares me, I am used to the simplicity of a carb It shouldnt be too hard though.

Im not too sure on the condition of the cat. It still has the stocker and that could very well be shot. I will tap it with something to see if I can hear anything rattling. Maybe now would be a good time to uprade to a 3 inch cat and hooker catback

 

yeah definatly get the intake gasket replaced first off thats probably the majority of the problem anyway ......its not that difficult to do i remember the first time we changed head gaskets on a ford taurus with a v6 when we got it all apart we thought how in the hell are we gonna get this back together again ...LOL...but its all in labeling the parts and bolts you remove in baggies and using masking tape and a sharpie...to write what is what on the bags and keep it all seperated other than that if you have problems ask here everyone will be glad to help where we can .....