Vehicle is a 1999 Grand Caravan with the 3.8L V6 and 95k miles. This summer I went to the effort (a LOT of effort) to replace plugs and plug wires. Runs super now-a-days. Until a couple of weeks ago, my wife comes in and tells me the van won't start. Sure enough, crank and crank with an occasional sputter, but won't start. I got it to start briefly by flooring it during cranking, but it died again after a few seconds regardless of feathering the throttle.
I let it sit a day and came out to the same thing, starter turns it over with an soccasional fire. Again motored briefly. Humm... must be a sensor out I figured. I smelled a strong gasoline smell from the exhaust during cranking. I got an old spark plug and did a check on a couple of the front cylinders and the spark seemed weak and intermittent. Again, the crank or camshaft position sensor I was thinking. Then my son wanted to see if we could get it to catch again and maybe it would stay lit if we held the throttle down. Sure enough, it caught and raced and stayed running. Smoothed out and ran perfectly.
I still figured some sort of sensor problem was going to rear it's ugly head, but it's been a few weeks now and the van continues to run perfectly. So the question, was it just flooded? This van has never started hard and never required any throttle during starting. Any ideas why it did this?
I let it sit a day and came out to the same thing, starter turns it over with an soccasional fire. Again motored briefly. Humm... must be a sensor out I figured. I smelled a strong gasoline smell from the exhaust during cranking. I got an old spark plug and did a check on a couple of the front cylinders and the spark seemed weak and intermittent. Again, the crank or camshaft position sensor I was thinking. Then my son wanted to see if we could get it to catch again and maybe it would stay lit if we held the throttle down. Sure enough, it caught and raced and stayed running. Smoothed out and ran perfectly.
I still figured some sort of sensor problem was going to rear it's ugly head, but it's been a few weeks now and the van continues to run perfectly. So the question, was it just flooded? This van has never started hard and never required any throttle during starting. Any ideas why it did this?