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I have finally solved the intermittent problems on my '94 aero.
Symptoms were:
- engine cuotout once at high RPM but restarted once RPM dropped
- sometimes would fail to start, appeared that battery was dead as volts would be much less than 10 and climate control would malfunction
- sometimes rapidly fluctuating battery volts whilst driving along.
At first I replaced the battery but this did not solve the problem.
Finally after the starting problem stayed there I tracked the fault to a poor crimp at the battery positive connection. Both the larger cable to the starter/alternator and the smaller cable to all electrical supplies are crimped together into the battery clamp. However I found that the smaller cable was not tighly held. Multimeter showed I was getting a .8 volt drop across this. I am off to an auto electrician to get a better connection. I deduced that the engine cutoff was partly due to this and partly due to poor alternator brushes (at high RPM the battery indicator light does come on, if this happenned at the same time as a bad connection at the battery there would be very low volts to the ECU until RPM dropped enough for the brushes to work again).
I have experienced this connection problem on previous cars and note that it is not good practice to crimp cables with different wire size in the same lug.
I have noticed that there a quite a few similar problems logged on this board and recommend that people check this out before replacing alternators and batteries. For those who don't have a multimeter if you do have a bad joint here the battery connector will get noticeably warm when the engine is off but you have the headlights on (best to check when car is cold).
Rather a long message but hopefully this will be of some use in the future.
posted by 144.134.190...
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