Sputtering and Smell of Gas

I have a 1992 Toyota Truck 2WD with a 6cyl engine. About a year ago, it started coughing and sputtering, and there would be a smell of gas. Took it to my Toyota dealership and they suggested changing fuel filter. That was done, and it went away. This summer, replaced the rad and some heater hoses, and it happened once more. It went away for two months, and then driving home this evening, it happened again. Gunned it a bit and then it cleared itself, and truck running perfectly. My hunch is that there is either screwy plugs or contaminant in the gas tank. Does anybody have any ideas?

Reply to
AC
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Could be a lot of things and may be hard to trace if its intermittent. Sounds like it could be dirty injectors from sitting two months but that may not explain the gas smell. Dirty plugs could cause poor firing. Does it smell like fresh gas or half burnt gas? Fresh gas smell could be from a fuel line leak, in turn low fuel pressure. Give it a good tune-up and get some hi-end injector cleaner. If your really ambitious, when idling pull each plug wire one at a time and see if there is much change in idling. It may be cylinder specific.

-PM

Reply to
Patrick Moore

I worded that badly, it wasn't sitting for two months. I had the problem again a couple of months ago when I had two hoses spilling coolant. At the time, with the sputtering, I thought I'd baked a head gasket, but I'm pretty sure now that the timing of the incident was purely coincidental. I'm not losing any coolant any more, nor is any disappearing mysteriously, so I'm fairly certain it has nothing at all to do with coolant leakage.

I'd say half-burnt.

As I said, I had the fuel filter replaced. I'm leaning towards the injectors or a screwy plug.

I may give that a try.

My only other thought is a problematic fuel pump. But every time I've had a fuel pump go in the past, it just simply died and I didn't go anywhere until it was fixed. I don't know, has anybody seen anything like this?

Reply to
AC

Smell of half-burnt gas and sputtering that clears up when giving more throttle is usually indicative of flooding--excess fuel getting into the engine.

The 92 V6 pickups had a single cold start injector which gave an extra squirt when the key was in the start position and coolant temp was low. This injector is electrically controlled but is under fuel pressure at all times. If it starts to leak it can allow excess fuel into the engine even when it's warmed up.

One or more of the regular individual cylinder injectors could also be leaking, but that's much less likely.

Next time the problem occurs, remove the plugs as soon as possible after the occurence. If one or more plugs is very noticeably blacker than the others, you probably have individual injector leakage, if they're all pretty much the same color, probably fault is the cold start injector.

To determine if the cold start injector is leaking or being activated when it shouldn't be, just unplug it and see if the problem goes away.

Reply to
Steve S.

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