87 5000s quits at random

["kenneth a. hale" <kenhale@fulton-net.com>]

Kenny Hale
600 Enterprise Ave.
Wauseon,OH 43567
419 337 9182    kenhale@fulton-net.com


. Perhaps you listers can help me. My 1987 5000s gas
nonturbo car has a bad habit of just quitting running whenever it feels like
it. First I thought it was the fuel pump so I changed that. Same thing. I
put a 12 volt lite bulb across the fuel pump just to see if when it quit the
bulb was still on or off or maybe dimmed. Bulb stayed brightly lite during
failure. Next I read on the list that  if there is ignition failure, the
tachometer would drop to zero. Sure enough, when the engine died, the tach
dropped to zero. next I checked all the distributor and coil connections to
make sure they were clean and tight. Everything looked just fine. When the
engine quits, you might be driving down the road or you may be waiting for a
traffic lite. When the lite turns green, several times when you go to
accelerate, it dies. Needless to say, it is not much fun to have to push the
car out of a busy intersection. After about 10 minutes of setting it will
usually start right up and go. Yesterday, it stalled about 6-8 times on me.
I went to junkyard and took a coil and driver assy. of a turbo 5000s. It
looked like the same one I had. When I went to install it I noticed that on
the coil from the junkyard had only two pins on the push on connector and
that the one on the car had 3. Anyway, I thought that maybe I could just
change the coil. Seems the coil mounting holes are spaced differently. So
what I ended up doing is cutting the black and blue wires that go into the
bottom of the coil(original coil) and mounting this other coil outboard. The
coil seemed to work ok. But I really noticed the difference when I took the
car for a drive. Felt like I had twenty More horse power. Ran great for 5
days, then started acting up again the same way. I don't know what the thing
is on the side of the coil(coil driver maybe). any suggestions??? Thank you
for any help you can offer. Kenny Hale