I have a baby coming and finally need to sell my old baby.... It's been sitting in my driveway for a year after I was unable to solve it randomly die-ing. At first I thought it was the CPU re-cap issue. Following the wisdom of the great thread here, I recapped my CPU with the recommended caps. It still randomly died. Then I realized the coil wiring harnesses were brittle, so I replaced both coils and harnesses and feel confident they are making good connection. It seemed fixed for awhile, then started die-ing again.

Here's what it does: It will start up fine, might run for awhile....but at some point it just dies, not sputters, just dies. It has to be electrical. The battery post connections have been cleaned and checked as well.

Anybody have any suggestions or threads that I should look at? It's a nice car and I'd rather not sell it as a tow away. Thanks!

 

Once the car dies, check for spark to make sure it is in the ignition side of things. It's the easiest thing to check and tells you which way to go troubleshooting.

 

First suspect to me would be a cam or crank sensor. If I had no way to check for the signals I'd just replace all them.
Another thing it can be is just a broken wire or bad connector on or for either one of them. An intermittent is a nasty thing to try to fix.
A person would need a scope all hooked up all the time when driving it.
If you had a 2002 clk430 Mercedes and it did the same thing you describe, the fix is to replace the crank sensor, and it does throw a code on that car, I don't know if it will on a Gen 1. Did you check for stored codes? You need to do that right after the problem occurs, not a year later with a dead battery, the ecu looses the code then.

 

Thanks guys, I'll post any updates when I get to it.