Hello everyone! New user to the forums here but I've lurked for about a year using this place as a guide to keeping my car from falling apart.

I lucked out an managed to become the second owner of a 91 Camaro RS with the 305 V8 with less than >110k miles at purchase Feb 2012 (it was a show car and babied all of its life).

My problem takes a titch to set up, so bear with me:

Since purchase I and my father noticed the Camaro felt like the idle was set quite high in the aspect that the car would do about 10mph on its own power if the brake wasn't held down. I took this to a mechanic that we had gotten a LOT of positive reviews from some postal carrier friends of ours (and postal carriers need their cars fixed YESTERDAY, so we generally take their word for it).

He looked it over, said the idle was at factory setting, then spent half an hour and a quarter tank of gas driving it, popping the hood, twisting the distributor cap, the repeating the process until the idle felt lower.

I'm damn near auto-illiterate so I took this as something odd but it seemed to work. He also did a tune-up and it worked just fine. Idled like a tractor and accelerated like a Cadillac but I'm a student who would rather have a loosely tuned daily driver and not have to make more trips to the mechanic or spend precious study time researching this car problem.

I now realize that was my first and biggest mistake: apathy.

Then this year a new problem arose when the weather started heating up: The Camaro will start, idle at normal levels for a split second, then die out. This originally started ONLY when the A/C or vent fan were on, so the mechanic determined that my alternator was weak and swapped it out, along with a new ERG valve to fix a phantom Check Engine light. Car starts working a treat.

Last week the same problem comes back but this time it doesn't care if the A/C is on, it just starts out, revs itself up to idle, then seems to flood out and die. The last time this happen an automatically-inclined friend had me floor the gas while turning the key ("Flood Mode" as he called it) and it started just fine after this. Also the &($&ing check engine light is back. Now I have to bank on the engine hitting normal idle long enough for me to floor the gas and get the revs up into the "Hey, look at me, I'm being obnoxious and showing off my V8 engine in a mall parking lot" levels to make the engine sort itself out and idle normally.

Since this new problem has arose I've gotten some more feedback on that mechanic from other mechanically-inclined people in the community and apparently he's a fantastic mechanic.... on Diesels... Not so much on gasoline engines.

Short version: Camaro RS 305 is flooding itself on start, and I've been told potentially because of a minor fix last year.

I don't expect a magical diagnosis over the internet, but is there like a magic bullet that causes this problem in this specific type of car? A common problem that causes flooding on start (or the car killing itself on start and it SOUNDS like a flood?). I've gotten suggestions ranging from running a timing light test to running a can of SeaFoam through it and hoping for the best.

Thanks for reading my long-winded first post, happy driving!

 

The coolant temp sensor fuels the engine when either hot or cold, that's where I'd start. The sensors resistence changes as the temp goes up, so you'll need an ohm meter & the chart. You can find the chart on the web.