Greetings from a new poster on this august forum...

I'm the owner, since 6/2000, of a 1997 2.4 T5 with the higher pressure turbo. It's a California car, sold originally in San Francisco, and now lives in the East Bay, being driven gently back and forth in 3 mile commutes several times a day by a grandmother that seldom gets the car fully warm. It's got all of 110k miles on it. She loves the car. I get to drive it when we want to go more than 20 miles anywhere, and then it warms up somewhat.

A couple of nights ago, she brought it home, and it had been running rough, and threw a check engine light at her. It ran all right for me the next morning around town. The dealer can't get it in to look at it for two weeks. Good thing she doesn't need to go to work next week.

Pep Boys ran the codes and changed the oil today. P1310 - manufacturer emission control code, and P0301 - cyl 1 misfire. Or so they told me. The car ran smoothly for me on the way down there. My wife complained it ran rough on the way home.

Any thoughts? Waiting a couple of weeks to get it looked at will not be all that much fun. Some folks don't ride so well in my pickup truck...

BTW, we've been having a bunch of smoke in the air for a week or more from a ton of wildland fires. Do you suppose that the computer is sensing that?

And the fuel is mid-grade Shell, and has been for years. That, and Chevron... Refueled Monday.

 

Look closely on the ignition wires. There will be the production date stamped on them in either Yellow or white numbers. They read as follows. the first 2 are the week of the year they were produced. The second 2 are the year.

If they are original then replace the Dist. cap,rotor, and wires that should fix the problem. You might want to do the plugs as well.

 

That's a reasonable place to start. I'm pretty certain that these aren't the original sent from the factory wires. This is an eleven year old car that has been dealer maintained all those years. The dealer is pretty fastidious about seeing that his opportunities don't slide by, IYKWIM...

OK. I'll dig under there tomorrow afternoon.

Thanks!

 

I will be gone most of the day tomorrow but will check either tomorrow night or Sun morning.

 

Hey! Don't worry about me. I'm going to do this slowly, and if I learn something, great! But it's the weekend, and I have two picnics and three functioning cars, and my wife has next week off.

If there is someone who needs urgent NOW help, it isn't me.

But thanks! I appreciate it.

 

If it were my car I'd first try changing/cleaning the plug on cyl 1 (first one to your left, right beside the timing belt).

 

Replacing the plugs is cheap, really, if I can do it with the tools I have already.

Any reason to use the $15/ea plugs, vs the $3/each Bosch beauties? This car piddles around town 95% of it's life, and gets driven hard once a year at best...

 

The Bosch are fine.