Dude! What the Heck Is Wrong With My Car

Don’t you just hate it when things are not going so well and just when you think things couldn’t get any worse, they somehow do?

It’s like a man getting fired from his job and while he’s headed home to tell his wife the good news, he has a flat that has him stranded on the road for the next 3 hours waiting on a tow truck.

THEN once he finally arrives home, he catches his wife in bed with his best friend. Now I would have to say that it would suck to be that gentleman right there. I wouldn’t wish any of that on my worst enemy.

That’s pretty much the worse day ever and with no better days in sight because I didn’t mention the amount of money he’s going to have to pay out when he finally divorces the bitch. After that, THEIR house is now solely HERS.

Talk about when it rains, it pours?! That sounds more like monsoon.

Now, nothing like that happened to me but I was in a little bit of a funk for a minute.

It all started a little over a month ago when I began having car troubles. I was having one of those up-and-down kind of weeks because of the anniversary of my grandmother’s passing was drawing near and she was on my mind heavily.

On top of that, I had just moved into a new place and you all know how stressful the moving process can be. One day, I had the cable/internet provider coming out to get me all set up so it felt like things were starting to turn around for the better.

Also, my brother had mentioned that he was getting a free Domino’s pizza from all those points that he had racked up over the last few months which gave me something else to look forward to.

Hey, you can’t turn down free food.

We waited until the weather let up a bit and headed down to Domino’s. It had rained hard the previous day and there were puddles everywhere. We drove across a big one in the Domino’s Pizza parking lot.

He left the engine running and went inside to get our food when all of a sudden the car began to shake very violently. Hence is where the story begins.

The first thing that came to mind was when he drove over that giant puddle and how that might’ve caused the issue but that was much to do about nothing.

I, instantly, could feel that the fuel and air mixture was off which was causing the vehicle to shake and misfire.

Anytime you’re dealing with the fuel and air mixture being off means that it could be an assortment of things. It could be a vacuum leak, faulty or dirty fuel injectors, bad spark plugs or coil packs or possibly some failing sensor somewhere on the vehicle.

I popped the hood, got out of the car and did a visual inspection to see if I could see anything that looked out of the ordinary. I looked and I looked but didn’t find anything and by that time, my brother was coming out of the pizza place with a free pizza as my stomach started growling like a grizzly.

We got our food and headed back home but the car drove extremely rough. It felt like the car was going to come apart on us. Eventually, a ding went off which meant that we had received another code and/or codes that had been stored in the system.

*Sidenote: Now the check engine light was already on because of an unrelated P1004 code. It’s a code resulting from carbon buildup in the runner of the intake manifold. I will address that separately in another post because I believe I’ve found a permanent fix for it.

When we got the car back home, I immediately checked for codes.

No, I’m lying, lol. I ate the pizza first and then I checked for codes. The pizza was really good by the way.

Now, enough about that! Back to the codes.

Now I don’t own a ODBII scanner so I just used the key fob trick.

The key fob trick is when you insert your key into the ignition and toggle it back and forth from the On position and ACC (Accessory) position three times in a quick motion. Then a 4 digit number should appear somewhere on your dashboard.

Sidenote: You probably noticed that there was a P in front of the 4 digit code I mentioned in a few paragraphs up above. If you’re using this method, you won’t get any letter just numbers.

You have to use your own discernment about what’s wrong with your vehicle to select the right letter. There are only 4 letters that are used for DTC’s (Diagnostic Trouble Codes) which are P, B, C and U. P is for Powertrain, B is for Body, C is for Chassis and U is for Network. Check out this website here for a more detailed explanation.

When I checked for codes, it gave me three: P0171, P0174 & P0306. Code P0171 indicates that the system’s too lean on bank 1 & P0174 indicates that the system’s too lean on bank 2. P0306 involves a misfire on the 6th cylinder.

The way the car shook reminded me of the time when I first changed the spark plugs in the vehicle and I received a bad spark plug. The vehicle shook something terrible so I focused on swapping out the spark plug in the 6th cylinder for a new one.

To get access to the 6th cylinder required me removing the intake manifold to get to it so I removed the questionable spark plug along with the coil pack to cylinder 4 which would allow me to access it more easily.

Well, that worked to no avail.

The new spark plug didn’t help any and I didn’t think about replacing the coil pack at the time since it was the sole one I had replaced back when I changed out all of the spark plugs a few years back.

Next thing I did was to start looking for a possible vacuum leak. I replaced the intake manifold’s upper gasket since it hadn’t been replaced since the car was purchased.

It’s a good thing that I did because during the gasket replacement, I found out that my egr (engine gas recirculation) tube seal was missing in action like Chuck Norris. I applied the new seal and thought that I had the problem solved.

I thought wrong.

I put everything back together and the damn thing was doing more shakin’, rattlin’ and rollin’ then Elvis did in his prime.

I decided to check for other vacuum leaks. I didn’t have access to a smoke machine but I did see a video online of someone checking it with a water bottle. You can check out the video here.

In the video, he took a plastic water bottle, cut a hole in the cap and filled it up with water. Next, the man sprayed it all over the intake and hoses to see if anything changed. I followed the same procedure and I didn’t find any leaks.

At this point, my mind was all over the place. I thought about replacing the lower intake manifold gasket and even the spark plug boots and seals.

Then a light bulb when off in my head.

THE COIL PACK!

Before I took the whole thing apart, I wanted to test the coil pack to see whether it was still good or not so I removed just the coil pack from cylinder 4 and placed it inside cylinder 2.

My thinking was that if the coil pack was bad that it would throw another code indicating a misfire on cylinder 2 and that’s exactly what happened. I had received a P0302 code which indicates a misfire on cylinder 2 when I check for codes.

Voila! I found the issue.

I thought that because it was a relatively, new coil pack that it would still be good but I was way off on that one. I headed down to O’Reilly Auto Parts and purchased a coil pack.

These things aren’t cheap either. The one that I replaced a few years ago cost me 72 dollars and it had bad reviews which I understand why. The new one was about 47 dollars with tax included.

I installed it right there in the parking lot, fired up my engine and it was working correctly once again. The last thing I did was disconnect the negative battery cable to clear the trouble codes.

It’s been well over a month later and I’m happy to report that those codes have stayed away and the vehicle’s running better than ever. Well, one coil pack down and only 5 more to go.