Once again, I'm here to ask you guys what you think happened to my f-body. I just got the car towed to my girlfriends and it's night time, so I'm going to wait until tomorrow during the day to dig into it and see what I find.

I was driving on the freeway going 80.. all of a sudden it was mis-firing really really bad, sputtering, and had zero acceleration.. I look in my rear-view and saw glowing embers flying off the back of my car.. so I pull over and as soon as the vehicle comes to a stop the car stalls.

I look under the car, the cat is glowing orange.. I wasn't even driving the car for more than 10 minutes prior to this happening.. I was able to grab the headers and hold on to them because they weren't blazing hot. I grabbed a spark tester out of the back of my car, and hooked it up to some plugs.. had my girlfriend crank the car over and there wasn't a spark. I also heard a clicking near the dizzy. A friend of mine had suggested that my cat had gotten plugged up, and caused it to do that.. another friend said that my dizzy went back and caused the car to run super rich (which makes sense). Tomorrow I'm going to pull the cap off and see if I can find any carbon deposits and see if it's grounding off anywhere.

Car was running just fine prior to this happening.. when the car was being taken off the flat bed the exhaust came apart right after the cat, so I can see inside the cat.. it was completely hollow, and I know it wasn't like that a couple weeks ago when I fixed my exhaust (it had fallen off after the cat, the goose neck adapter got banged up and the clamps weren't really holding it together.

So, at this point it looks like a distributor problem, as I don't have any spark.

Any and all help is EXTREMELY appreciated, thank you for your time.

Also, car is an 85 iroc with a 305 tpi.

 

I would looking the spark issue first, maybe bad coil or module in the hel. the cat ways more than likely glowing due to all the unburned fuel getting dumped into it when the spark was cutting out.

 

check for 12v to the large pink wire to the hei with the key on. coil, and pickup coil testing below.

http://www.justanswer.com/chevy/5a4m...ystem-the.html

 

Alright, I do own a volt meter so I'll check for 12 volts on the pink wire first thing tomorrow. I'm also thinking it's a dizzy related issue considering the no spark condition. Cylinder #1 had a misfire since I bought the car, was going to throw new cylinder heads on it once I had the cash to do so. I could imagine that if the spark was intermittent then it would cause the unburned gas to dump into my cat, igniting itself and causing it to glow red hot, where as my headers wouldn't be hot at all because it wasn't igniting in the cylinder. I'm assuming that if the misfire in combination with a dizzy going bad, would have the potentiality to cause that to happen.

I'm also going to ohm test the injectors and see what kind of results I get.

 

Either the core was fractured by the previous damage to the exhaust, or the ign died and came back, filling the exhaust with fuel and then blowing it apart. Sounds like the cat core exitted in flaming chunks out the back of the car. Was there a huge bang or a surge?

Possibly the muffler is now clogged with debris. Get it running first before hooking the exhaust back up to verify.

 

Hey guys, thank you for your input!

Turns out the rotor decided to disintegrate for whatever reason.. the caps button was embedded into the rotor itself.



Now I have to figure out why a 2 month old rotor/cap decided to explode like that.

Also TreeFiddy, I had my music blasting when it happened, so I was unable to hear any sort of noise. Going to go now and get a new cap and rotor and hook the exhaust back up.

 

check the carbon button !!!

 

Lol, the carbon button broke off and embedded itself into the rotor, you can see it's remnants in the picture

Just finished installing the new rotor/cap.. started right up.. granted it was EXTREMELY loud due to the fact that nothing behind the cat is hooked up.. but hey.. at least I gutted my cat without doing too much work



I lol'd

 

carbon button checked !!!

 

Excellent damage well done sir! Did the brass contact hit the cap terminals or something - where did it go?

 

When I took the cap off, the metal from the rotor was underneath the rotor. I'm not exactly sure what had caused this to happen.. maybe it was just a defective rotor and the spinning caused it to come apart. I'm not sure, but I replaced it with el-cheapo parts, and thankfully they're under warranty (although my old cap/rotor should have been as well, but it wasn't showing up on my autozone account for whatever reason).

 

If it was me I would probably remove the dizzy and check for play in the shaft. I have seen them do this and cause exactly what you have there. Just another thing to look at.

 

Just an update.. car got me to work.. which was an hour drive.. but then when work was finished and I went to leave the job site I didn't even get half a mile away before the rotor exploded. So, I bought a new dizzy from Autozone and i'm waiting for it to be shipped there to pick it up. Not sure what would have caused it to become bent or whatever, I'm assuming it's "natural wear and tear". Just odd, never dealt with this before.

 

That gives new meaning to busting a cap'n'yo a$$ lol.

This old school gangsta rap moment was brought to you by another fragmented thought in my head.