Car is a 91 Camaro RS with the 305 TBI.

issue is, car runs in the driveway just fine. Take her on the road and she runs very well. However every note and then at low/idle speeds I’ll notice the oil pressure drop, check engine light goes on and she’ll just die. I put her in neutral or park and she starts right up and we carry on just fine again.

After some reading I did replace the oil pressure sensing unit, oil and filter, the air sensor on the firewall, cap and rotor and the idle control solenoid. However issues still persists.

My only other thought is to check base timing. What should bar be?

She has long tubes so some thought might be the knock sensor but I’m not sure.

Hoping you all might have experienced this before and can say, “Hey stupid it’s your _____!

Thanks!

 

Leave the "timing" alone.

Not sure about "idle control solenoid". Never heard of that.

Not the headers or the knock sensor, or any interaction between them.

When you "rebuilt" the injectors, did it help?

That kind of distributor is also well and widely known to cause bizarre problems of this nature when the "starwheel" down in there goes bad (cracks and falls to pieces). Best at that point to just buy a whole other distributor since there's nothing "special" about those, one from another (besides being made of chinesium vs something better), and they're pretty cheeeeeeeeep.

 

And THEN ya get to set the timing, yay !!!

 

Apologies, I’m no mechanic. If I misspoke please ignore me.

i made a mistake, it’s not idle control solenoid, it’s the IAC that I replaced. I did that with the assumption that oil pressure may be dropping if i the idle is not high enough. If that was stupid on my part, ok, but it was a cheap enough part to try.

i did not rebuild the injectors, I installed new ones.

On the distributor…. If that were bad or broken, wouldn’t that persist all the time? She drives wonderfully for some time and then this happens. S shut it off, back on and fine for a while again.

Apologies again, I’m learning and that’s why I came here. I was out of ideas except the timing.

 

It's not the "timing". Put that out of your mind.

That kind of distributor is notorious for intermittent problems of that sort, as I described. My son's truck (early 90s 4.3 TBI) got towed I don't even know how many times for it. It would die somewhere, sometimes start back up, sometimes not, so he'd call the tow truck. Finally he had it brought to my house and it stayed broke long enough to find that there were no pulses coming from the dist when trying to start it. So yeah.

As Orange mentioned, when replacing a distributor, you DO have to be concerned with "timing". However, if youi install the new dist correctly, it will start right up and be close enough to where you can dial it in without any light, mark, tab, spec, number, or book. You just make it run the best it can. And voilà! it is then right. The ENGINE knows when it's right and will tell you quite clearly. "If it RUNS good, it IS good".

 

I appreciate your feedback and the sharing of your past experiences. I’ll look at replacing the distributor in the next week or so.

thank you