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97 K3500 starting issue

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Rebil79

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I will try to keep this short.
Trucks cranks for a long time before it starts. I will crank let off, crank let off and so on. When it does finally start it acts like it only catching on a couple of cylinders before it finally runs on all 8 (350). Once it runs it runs perfect.
Ok, my brother teachers the diseal program at a local college so he has access to all the automotive tools including the GM scan tool. We put that on and it came up with a crank sensor (low voltage I think). While the truck was on the scanner the batterys died. So our thought was that having a weak battery that the truck wasnt spinning over fast enough for the crank sensor. Found out what battery was bad, got rid of it, and went back to a single battery. Still had the issue. Next we found a gas leak and thought that it wasnt getting enough fuel pressure, fixed it, same problem.
Then we put it back on the scan tool (we cleared the orginal code) to see if the crank sensor code was back. It wasnt. So now we are stumped and decided to do the crank sensor anyway since it had the code once. After the crank sensor was changed it still has the same problem.

Any ideas??

Sorry its so long and hopefully I didnt leave anything out. This truck isnt driven daily and this process has been done over 3 or 4 months.

Not sure where to go from here, there are no other codes coming up in the computer.

Thanks, and again sorry its so long.


Rebil
 
Weak fuel pump loosing pressure as it sits and the fact that it uses the poppit injector setup.
 
That is gonna be the next thing we check, it has a fairly new fuel pump, probably 5 years ago but maybe only 20k miles if that.


Rebil
 
MTChevy said:
I've seen this happen due to injector spyder. Poppit setup. Keep us updated!
Click to expand...

Now that you say that I kinda remember reading something about this. Something plastic cracks maybe, going off of a not so good memory. Isnt there a change in the injector setup around 97/98?

Thanks
I will keep you posted.


Rebil
 
The fuel pressure regular is what normally goes bad on these it will start leaking acting just like a flooded carb motor and it is located on the back side of the spyder assembly. There is an updated spyder assemble that is a lot better than the factory spyder assemble and it can be found on places like ebay very easy. One other thing you might check is I have seen the upper bushing in the distrubator go bad and it will do funny things to.
 
Yeah the codes won't come back up until it completes a drive cycle.

The regulator may be leaking, or the tubes and poppets might be clogged limiting fuel flow. You can take it apart and clean it all individually if you don't want to spend upwards of $350 for the updated multi-port spider.
 
I've seen many of those spyders have a split in the fuel line that goes to it,under the intake...I think they may sell it separately now,you used to have to buy the whole spyder in the past..my friend has replaced a few dozen of them on the 4.3's that used them...even got a decent S-10 Blazer 4x4 free,when the customer decided he'd rather not spend 400 bucks to replace it,he handed him the title and bought a used truck from the car lot my friend works at..
 
Here is an update. Problem not fixed yet. Had another issue come up in the mean time causing start up even harder. The coolant temp sensor was bad. We had it on the computer and it was reading that the coolant temp was -40. This was causing a high idle when it did start and when you first gave it gas it would stumble as if it was going to stall. New sensor and that fixed that.
Now back to the orginal not starting issue, we did a fuel pressure check and that passed within spec. It also didnt seem to leak down after the fuel pump shutoff. The fuel pressure did drop from about 62 or so with the key on not running to about 55 or so when it was running, not enough to cause the start up issue.
So still kinda stuck, so for now Im gonna change out the starter since its on its way out this weekend. Im also gonna get a new battery as this one is about 5 years old.
After that if the problem is still there not sure where to go.
Oh ya also checked the distrubtor, seems to be no play in it.

Rebil
 
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