liquid55

I have been trying to nail down why my 95 ls has an intermittent cutting out feeling in the acceleration. I went through the ignition and replaced the cap rotor and plugs because it really needed it badly. It seemed to help a great deal but was still there. So I went and refueled using super unleaded, I had cut back to the cheaper stuff because of gas prices. So with the super unleaded the problem seems to have vanished . Ok, so it must be the octane and the knock sensors kicking and retarding the timing. Does anyone know the details on how the ECU retards the timing and when it returns the timing back to normal ? Does this happen almost instantly ? Or does the ECU retard the timing for a predetermined point of time once any spark knock is detected ?

As a side note, man those dist caps and rotors are a pain ! I had never done them before and I had no service manual, I just winged it. The only tip I could pass on to someone is that I didnt remove the 12 mm(there is only one, the rest are 10mm) bolt on the passenger side of the dist cap shroud. So I didnt actually remove the shroud all the way, I just pulled it down a bit to get at the bottom bolt in the dist. cap. (remove the serp belt to do this) I think it made things easier because on the drivers side, the shroud was kind of a pain to actually get back into place and seated fully. My thoughts were, why did lexus concoct something so convoluted as this arrangement ? My infiniti Q45 had coil packs directly on top of each plug, so that meant no distributor cap and rotor and no spark plug wires because there was no distributor ! All of these parts require maintenance and if you could design it without them, you think they would do it. Maybe they want to sell the parts and lots of labor to make their dealers richer ?? I would hate to see what the dealers charges for parts and labor to do this job. I know on the Q45 it was $400 ?? or something like that and there was no cap and rotors to the job.