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http://www.onstar.com/us_english/jsp/explore/onstar_basics/helpful_info.jsp?info-view=tech- _equip
In the past there had been lists of techniques where you can determine if it's analogue only or digital by the response when you said "help" I believe.
Might check the OnStar discussion here on Edmunds. It's closed but may have info you can use.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
Oldswrench
There're more lights in there than I thought.
Love my 96 Aurora but have paid more than it's probably worth in the last 2 yrs. the first eight were problem free. If you have a problem try and find a service shop with GM diagnostics, the dealers are notorious selling in the service department. . Especially now since Olds is no longer. Everything is a "special order" but you can find the parts online for just about everything.
Case in Point: Lupient (formerly Olds) wanted $900+ for radiator replacement. I found new radiator for 200 and paid 70 for mechanic to install. Thanks dealer I bought the car from.
MW
Date: February, 1996
Subject:
Oil Leaks from Oil Pan to Lower Crankcase Attaching Bolts (Clean Bolt/Apply Sealant)
Models:
1993 Cadillac Allante
1994-96 Cadillac Concours, DeVille, Eldorado, Seville
1995-96 Oldsmobile Aurora
with 4.0L, 4.6L Engine (VINs 9, Y, C - RPOs L37, LD8, L47)
Condition
Some engines may exhibit engine oil leaks sourced at oil pan to lower crankcase attaching bolts and bolts attaching the brace between the transaxle and engine oil pan.
Cause
This condition may be caused by porosity in the lower crankcase area near the oil pan bolt threads. This type of leak would show oil leaking at or near the head of the fastener affected.
Correction
To correct porosity leaks in these areas, use the following procedure:
1. Remove the bolt which is leaking.
2. Thoroughly clean the bolt hole with brake clean or suitable equivalent cleaner.
3. Thoroughly blow out bolt hole with shop air (20 psig maximum pressure).
4. Thoroughly clean the bolt with brake cleaner or suitable equivalent cleaner.
5. Apply a moderate amount of Loctite(R), P/N 12345382 (Blue Service removable) threadlocker/sealant to bolt.
6. Install bolt and torque to 9.5 Nm (85 lb in.).
Pan Gasket Replacement
IMPORTANT: The engine oil pan can be replaced either in the vehicle with the transaxle removed or by removing the engine from the vehicle.
Remove engine and place on stand.
Drain oil, then remove oil pan retaining bolts and the oil pan.
Gasket is reusable unless damaged. Do NOT remove gasket from oil pan groove unless replacement is required.
Install a new oil seal if required by starting the seal into the pan groove in both directions. NOTE: If replacing the gasket do not expose new gasket to oil before inserting gasket into pan groove, gasket will expand when exposed to oil and will not stay in pan groove.
Position oil pan to crankcase.
Oil pan bolts and torque in sequence, to 10 Nm (89 in lbs) .
Transaxle assembly.
Refill engine oil and check for leaks.
I have been driving it since and I have the common problems, rough idle, tough starting, and when it does start the rpms bounce and then settle, poor performance, also I have noticed a decline in gas mileage. Could all this be caused by bad wires or coils, which it seems for so many others was the culprit?
Or could it be fuel system related? I am afraid that I may have a combination of problems on my hands and don't want to go around throwing away money to try and figure it out.
If someone could please advise me as to what best cheapest plan of action you think would be suitable, and if you recommend any places to get good prices on parts since I have found that they can range greatly, I would appreciate it tremendously. I have had much luck with sites like this before and hope to have the same again.
NOte: I am not the most car savvy person here for sure, so try and not be tto technical please. Thank You.!
I replaced my '97's FPR twice. First time in 2002 at 77,000 miles; I had been experiencing the typical hard starting problem, then an underhood fire. Second time in July this year at 122,000 miles. Symproms were different this time; I had been getting P0171 and P0172 codes (rich mixture) and the engine had stalled a couple of times; replacement fixed these problems.
I would be surprised if a leaking FPR would affect specific cylinders differently, but who knows. I have from time to time observed misfire counts on one or two cylinders using my code scanner. Not enough to set the service engine soon light. Fortunately, the situation has always been of short duration and I have never been able to find the cause.
As usual, use AC Delco. I paid about $50 each for the two I bought. I recommend GMPartsDirect.com or RockAuto.com; I have no affiliation with either except as a satisfied customer. BTW, I noticed in one parts listing that there are different FPR part numbers for '97 with the original fuel rail vs. recall replacement stainless steel fuel rail; I do not know if this may apply to your '98.
Les
Well, I was wrong. Out of the two weeks I had it I drove it for about 3 hours. I think I have everything buttoned down now, but I seem to have some discrepencies with the guages. The temp. gauge shows about 220 F. At normal op. temp. Never over-heats, just seems high compared to my other cars.Is this normal?
As for the oil, the oil pressure meter on the information center will read about 18 ~ 22 psi. at idle on initial start-up. When up to operating temp. the meter reads about 6 psi. Sometimes it even drops to 5 (never lower) and gives me warning lights. At speed there is also a relative drop in pressure as well. Is my oil pump bad, or is this another case of "when electronics attack"?
BTW I still love my Aurora, even if it breaks a lot.
Also, I took notice of the earlier posts explaining the installation procedure of the FPR and I made sure the O-Rings are out.
You did make sure to leave in 1 "O" ring right?
Also - the PCM will not allow the fuel pump to run if the oil pressure is low. I'm assuming you put in about 7½ qts of oil but what does you oil pressure read?
Next - fuel pump; but what code did you get from the SES light?
reset oil life by scrolling to the oil life using the "engine" button and then hold "reset" for 10 seconds.
I was going to replace the oil pressure sender unit over the weekend but all I could get is an aftermarket unit so I will wait until later in the week. However, it stalls when pressure is high.
I took the fuel pump out and the strainer was COMPLETELY blocked. The bottom of the tank was COMPLETELY covered in dirt. And the fuel was BLACK!? So I think I found my main problem, what secondary issues this may cause, I dont know. I will be installing the new pump, draining fuel and cleaning tank tomarrow and I will update.
Has anyone else had something similar happen?
Well they pointed out that you should never mix the green and orange. If even a drop of green is put into an orange system, dump and flush before refilling and to always use distilled water for the 50/50. And to use the 50/50 premixed for topping off.
This gives me some hints as to a problem I saw. 95 Regal 3.1. My wife and I had the car and it had the orange. One of our daughters got the car, and after several months I get a call, Daddy the car is running hot. (by now you should all know the female and that they have more important crap on their mind than to check fluid levels periodically and look for unusual wet spots after the car sits) OK, she was about a half mile from a service station and I told her to drive there at moderate speed. After thought, do not add anything till it cools, but she was no longer answering her phone. So I don't know what really happened there.
Several months later I'm hearing that the coolant is going down and car is running warm.
And she wants it fixed yesterday. It was coming up on coolant change I think, but it also looked nasty and a black gunge in the overflow bottle. Water pump was weeping some. I proceed with a flush, heavy duty. But whatever that black stuff was in the bottle, it was next to impossible to remove. My original assumption was that someone added water from a contaminated container, but what was it? To remove this diesel black globuli, after trying several things including oven cleaner, I finally hesitantly used brake cleaner solvent because I was worried about the plastic bottle. I could see that had an effect upon it and more applications of oven cleaner then removed the final portion. However during the flush period, more showed up in the bottle, meaning it was in the engine. Repeat bottle cleaning and another dose of heavy duty flush. Now what appeared to be intermittent and heat related shows up. Fans not coming on and the housing on the temp sensor was cracked so replace. Fans started working, but at a temp higher that what I would normally have seen on the guage. I noted that during the thermostat out final flush, a few miles of driving the guage hardly moved off the bottom. That messed with my thinking and I wasn't cautious by the exhaust manifold heat shield, blistering the fool out of my arm. Dang,(other words really)I won't make that mistake again. But the coolant was relatively cool, right? Well heat soak from the block evidently raised the temp of the thermostat housing significantly. Much harsher words explained my feeling as I grabbed it to reinstall the thermostat.
Enough comedy. Well one more. Daughter has got to have the car back, even though you explain it isn't done. But you should have showed up at her door step weeks earlier and done all of the preventative maintenance and repairs while she showered and dressed to go with her friends and gave her a $100 for the inconvenience.
BTW, new thermostat showed no change. She got the car back and boyfriend went to work on it. He measured temp with infrared thermometer and told me some ridiculous temp of like 280 degrees. I have to wonder if he wasn't seeing the exhaust manifold. And that the fans weren't coming on, again, so he hot wires them.
I know there was more involved as I could not seem to get all the air bled from the radiator and suspect that a head/lower manifold gasket may have been going, again!
Dexcool? I think not, but am more suspect of them adding coolant to a over heated motor. And that black sludge, maybe a product of someone adding green to the Dexcool. Also in the class action were complaints of plugged radiators.
If someone gets the real dope on what is going on relative to Dexcool, please post back.
Either situation can through a lot of noise on the DC power, but the battery acts as a tremendous polarized capacitor and should take care of most of it. The distance from the battery affects the outcome because we are talking time to travel. All components should be designed to withstand reverse polarity, especially of the voltage a shorted diode would produce. There are many components in your vehicle that can through much higher inductive kickback pulses and all should have a diode across the connector of the power lead or internal to prevent this. Relays and motors are excellent sources of this trouble. One such example is the engineering blunder to have a diode across the cooling fan motor and added via service bulletin because it was blowing the traction module if I remember correctly. Something like a $1000 repair. Those spikes can easily run into hundreds or thousands of volts with a very short duration and can easily kill solid state components. They should have no effect on other components such as bulbs or motors.
Plugs looked good and not very old AC platinum.
Don't know whose wires anymore, red, but supposed to be lifetime as I recall. Not a cheap set, but cheaper than Delco's.
Is there known problems with aftermarket coils?
I would like to take another swing at this before delivering into the hands of grease monkeys, so I'm looking for a sensible approach.
Currently thinking of buying a Delco coil, and do the swap out to see if locates a weak one.
Possibly then doing wires, but hate to replace $70 wires with $100 wires to not fix it.
Next on the list would likely be an injector, fuel related problem. Now thinking of it, I might try that before the wires, assuming an injector is relatively cheap. just would take a long time to locate swapping eight times and then running sufficiently to ensure I got it.
What say you all?
Forced to remove it, the A/C cools much better. I can only guess that it was messing with the window heat sensors causing the system to mix more hot air before reaching the vents.
But with being all over this car, including replacing front pulleys, in a short time, I now notice a vibration like noise when the pump is running. I hope it isn't going out and that maybe I just disturbed a line enough to cause it or maybe a bolt is loose on the compressor mounting which I've had make that noise.
When caught up, I'll jump back into the A/C arena, and look further into replacing the orifice tube with the variable one. According to the inventors site, an adaptor is needed with Cadillac type A/C, temp sensing, not pressure. I wrote them, but never heard back as to the availability of it. The variable orifice is widely available.
I want to do this because of the claims of increased cooling at lower rpm's, less strain on the compressor, and improved fuel efficiency.
Inventor tests show far less than half as many bad compressors with severe testing. Fixed orifice tube is a compromise via charge amount for best cooling. At idle and low rpm, to get enough liquid for good cooling requires more freon. This also leads to higher head pressures when stuck in hot traffic. But the more freon is also bad when running fast. The obvious would have been the expansion valve which has such a tiny orifice in it that it was deemed to high of maintenance and no longer used most of the time.
The coolant pump is driven by a belt that is driven by a pulley on the end of one of the camshafts. Replace the pump. Even if the leak is with a gasket (doubtful, in my opinion), it would be penny wise and pound foolish not to replace the pump at the same time. ACDelco replacements can be bought for $40.
Les
I think on this vehicle, the water pump assembly does a twist lock to get into place. No bolts. I don't know what tool is required.
But I just realized something that may be contributing to poor milage. Torque convertor not locking most of the time.
I forget how the sensing occurs, but I read that a tight power train when going down a rough road can induce enough change to make the system think there is misfire occuring and it's first reaction is to disengage the torque converter clutch. So even though the misfire is so inperceptible that most of the time you can't notice, sometimes mine runs smooth enough that it engages the clutch. (I knew that the clutch wasn't engaging, but didn't realize it might be related this time until I felt it engaging a few times around 45)
Has anyone trouble shot a possible injector problem the way i posted earlier?
What do you think of trying a coil swap?
we have determined that there is a partial blown gasket, but one shop contends its not enough to cause my problem.. which is...
overheating then cooling down then overheating, etc.
flushed, new thermostat, water pump operable. Most recently, the car will go to the redline in constant driving, and then cool to near normal, creep back towards red, but stop short. It may cycle a couple of more times, perhaps even go into 'dark' red (all alerts) or just medium red ( turn off ac alert only)
have a new cap so it doesn't boil over, even when I stop. Even dealership seems not to want to touch it, I thought it could be a bad sensor or control board. any thoughts? I was hoping there would be a method to monitor the water temperature outside the system to see if there was agreement with the sensors, is the infrared gun reasonably accurate? Also, ever seen a clear hose 'insert' so I could review the thermostat and pump action? entering the zone of the final straw...
dated Jan 1998.
the bulletin covers information on the service availability of the 1-2 and 2-3 shift solenoids for the 4T80-E transaxle.
when i pulled the pan and lower controls assembly I found
the solenoid had separated because the retaining bracket was cracked The repair kit comes with both solenoids and a new retaining bracket.
Good luck mreds.
It will clear by its self with out hooking up a scan tool
any information would be appreciated.
Thanks mreds
Other than that... farewell and good luck to you all... you'll need it!
Thanks-
Greg
Henri
Which gasket? Dealer don't want to touch??? Are they aware of some history they aren't telling you? It could be they are afraid of getting dragged into the Dexcool class action. And I'm beginning to see reason for it. It is looking more and more like the crud that the buick got was from mixing some old green with the dexcool. Part of the suit claims it plugs radiators, heater cores. And to the best of my knowledge, I've never seen a stern warning against any mixing of the two and the possible results. It calls for just a flush, but I used the heavy duty drive for like 5 hours stuff. And what i got was more of the near insoluable junk in the overflow bottle. I now think that was just excess in the sytem and the flush obviously did not break it down any. The only question now is what formed that crud. Was it the coolant incompatibility or that and a combination of gas seepage past gaskets?
This brings concern to me as well. One of the first things I did upon acquiring car was take care of coolant. Basically it looke like water, and had no thermostat. Since working those issues, I've noticed a little cruddy stuff showing up in the reservoir. Since this is one of the vehicles with infamous leak where they add a couple of pellets I thought this was maybe excess working its way back to the high point. I had wondered why the flush didn't remove. I'm going to fish some of this from the bottle and see if it looks like what was in the buick. BTW, used Dexcool as it says on the cap.
On your issue, do the fans cycle or change speeds with the guage? Infrared are likely accurate to their level of calibration, but make sure it only sees the source of heat you are trying to read.
All along they've said not to mix the two types of coolant and not to contaminate the DexCool with green stuff. They said not to use the same equipment to check freeze level, e.g.
The thing they didn't say was that changing the DexCool at 2 years 24000 miles was what should be done! Just like changing the green stuff. The DexCool doesn't survive long use 5 years or 150000 miles for example.
That's especially true if the system has any air in the radiator with the hot coolant circulating through. Some cars had filler necks that trapped air instead of filling completely like my Buick does. The air with hot coolant being bubbled through it led to breakdown of the coolant. That caused a brown sludge.
The pellets they put in for stop leak are some organic material (walnut shells someone said). It causes a brown particlate discoloration that shows up in the recovery tank too. But they only put in 5 pellets at most and they're about a teaspoon in size when crumbled.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
Something smells about this and it looks like it is going to track back to GM.
On the air thing, if it is bad to have air with it, then it is next to impossible without creating an expandible bladder system. It sounds like your Buick has an unpressurized recovery bottle, which is exposed to air and at a low temp most of the time. But with the Aurora you have a pressurized bottle and multiple hoses allowing some circulation to bleed air to it. And this high pressure encourages the mixing of air into the fluid, much like making a carbonated beverage. And still it claims good for 100K. Just recently there has been showing up on some shelves a rejuvinator for dexcool. This was part of the defensive side in the class action. It was suggested to be used at the 2 years you mentioned, but you see no info on the 5yr/150K bottle of dexcool. There is certainly more to follow on this story, but my fear is that it is going to drag out so long that most of the affected vehicles will be off the road. Similar to the Firestone 500 radials. By the time it became national knowledge and the lawyers dragged it around and finally Firestone agreed to the recall, average driving would have put 75K on what was then a long life tire of 50K. I had one such set and they were made less than 10K tires after the last one in the recall. Tires were serialized back then. Because the car was only driven about 6K a year, I still had lots of milage left on them. First one separated, the dealer told me sorry charlie. About a month later the other front separated. About 3 months later one of the rear separated. I didn't wait on number 4.
You mention brown sludge. What the Buick had was black as diesel oil. I'll have to retrieve a couple of globules from the Aurora and determine the color. It looks somewhat grayish in the bottle, but color could easily be distorted against the orange coolant and yellowish plastic bottle.
Does that organic material show up as small flakes or does it tend to clump?
If you have three successful start cycles, I think it is supposed to go out. That would be cold start through a run at warmed up. The snapshot of parameters at the time of failure are supposed to stay for like 30 cycles. Cheap scanners may not be able to retrieve codes when the light is out. Better should be able to, but it might take the dealer system to pull all the data at time of snapshot.
Thanks
GK
--Robert