ZJ stalling, simple fix.

[pfarber]

My 97 ZJ has close to 190k on it. Not bad for a 19 year old car. Still gets good mileage and not burning to much oil. Maybe a quart every 5000 miles.

But last week it started running rough and actually backfired through the exhaust. First thing I though was shit, time for a new car. But oddly it ran fine the rest of the day. Next day, started fine, but every time I went from PARK to DRIVE it stilled, and when coming from high RPM to idle, it would stall. So time to google. Initially the Idle Air Controller was the most likely culprit. So I cleaned it (really wasn't that dirty) and it was still stalling. FUCK.

So I looked over the ignition system. Plugs good (50k plugs have about 30k on them), wires good (no arcing) and cap/rotor look OK. I did notice one hold down screw was lose, I figured that might cause an arc. Nope, still stalling. Double fuck.

So time to google. Everything was pointing towards a new PCM. There is an issue with cold solder joints and lose pins. Can be fixed, but I figure a reman PCM would be better. Well, e-bay lists them $100 (but you need the exact model, none were listed that I needed) an reman were $300 + $80/$100 core charge. So I'd be out $400 till my core refund. There is a repair you can do but I was not thrilled about doing it. Takes a few hours. Then I ran across a post about the 12 things you need to check if your ZJ stalls. I read them all and did most, and a few were just not applicable. But one was, CLEAN THE GROUNDS. There are three and all were in less than stellar condition. I brushed, sanded and filed connectors and used acetone to get rid of the oil. Put electrical grease on all the studs/connectors and tightened everything back up.

Two days and not a stall yet. I do this all the time on the G503. Heck I did it two weeks ago when I did my 'pre-spring maintenance'. Yet for some reason it never dawned on my to do it to my modern car.

With any luck its fixed. Since the stalling cannot be replicated (and it would stall every time as I mentioned above) hopefully its fixed. I really want this car to hit 200k. The motor can do it... the body... not so sure.