Always check the simple things first

After getting the Konis installed, I took the car out for a test drive to make sure everything was put back together.  It didn’t go well.  The car wouldn’t idle, once you blocked the throttle open a hair, the idle had a terrible stumble in it, and when it was under load it was just terrible.  Everything that I saw indicated that the car was dumping fuel.  I hooked up the laptop and checked the temp gauges while the car was turned off and everything was reading where it should.  I re-calibrated the tps but still, it was running really badly. 

My next step was to assume an injector was stuck open, but right before I started digging out my spare set, it occured to me that when the car wasn’t running, all the gauges were pretty much rock-solid.  When the car was running, however, the temp and tps readouts were bouncing all over the place.  Thinking that maybe it was the vibration causing it, I started to shake the ms harness and found that the screw which held all the grounds to the body wasn’t connected any more.

Tightened up that screw, solidifying the ground, and everything runs great again.  Whew!