Why is my Chevy S-10 struggling on power?
My grandfather has a 4wd crew cab chevrolet 2002 s10 and I don't understand why it is cutting out. It is a 4 door, 4.3 v6 vortex engine from my understanding with about 125k on it.
When the truck is cold, it will start up fine and it will run but after it warms up, it starts to hesitate. Not too bad and it never cut out completely but it kept acting like it wanted to. We thought that it cold be a dirty air filter and fuel filter so we changed them out completely. The fuel filter really showed it's age because after about 100k, it was spitting out almost black fuel. (Yes, we agree that we should change it every 50k and we will). After we replaced both, it started up much more quickly, and it ran great. No hesitation and the throttle response came back as new. It wasn't even a few weeks later that the truck started doing this again. Now it's doing it about the same if not, maybe slightly worse.
We are not sure what is going on and we would like to see if you all can help us fix this since we really need that truck running smoothly. Thanks all.
Answers
You might try and pull some trouble codes and see if that gives you any hints. It's possible I suppose that you could have totally fouled injectors from lack of maintenance---so you could try a powerful injector cleaner such as you might buy from NAPA Auto Parts.
With 125K it could be a long list of issues to cause this type of symptom, so unless you want to throw parts at it, it may be best to pull some codes and do some basic testing such as a fuel pressure test and a compression test. Also don't discount a plugged up catalytic converter.
Well, one thing that was mentioned to me was that the catalytic converter was showing signs of giving out. What exactly is the problem with it is unknown to us since the last guy to work on it told us about it. There are no check engine lights on right now so we can't really say anything about that unless it would still throw codes even with the light off.
I have a 94 s10 and it has some problems starting. When it is started it misses and starves for power it has the 2.2 engine
a catalytic can be tested pretty easily.