Hi there everyone

I bought my SC300 1996 Manual on Saturday, had it shipped from CA to FL actually. It was running awesome for over 300 miles until today.

I first went to the store and bought some Lucas fuel injector cleaner and put it in with a full tank of gas. The car ran great still. Next I went home and sprayed the engine with gunk engine degreaser, then sprayed it off 15 minutes later with the hose like the directions say. I then let the car sit for about half hour with the hood open. I started it up to let it idle and burn off the water and degreaser.

It ran great still...went to the bank about 3 miles away and it ran great, got on the interstate driving slow no more than 3000 rpms before shifts and the car started to buck and hesitate at any throttle position. It runs like its on half the engine, has no power and idles lower and shakes at idle. It also threw the check engine light on the way home.

What could be wrong? I opened the hood facing the sun to see if it needs to dry out maybe. I've also disconnected the battery.

This sucks to have caused a problem trying to clean the car up!

Thanks for any advise

 

mmmm. you could have googled this and came up with a bunch of crap. bassicly everybody does this once in their life. you got water down in the spark plugs, or on the cap wires. you have to find where the water is on the spark plug wires

 

Check your distributor cap and rotor. It probably needs replacing because of water damage.

 

Are you sure that's all it is? Why did it idle for 15 minutes okay and then 3 miles down the road start acting up? I'll check them right now.
I once did this in my RX-7 and it was the ignitor that I broke by washing it.

 

moral of that story was to not wash your engine bay again....either that or take more care, i used nothing more than WD-40 and some shop rags. It took a while but the engine bay looked new after i was done and the WD-40 not only cleaned/shined everything it touched but protected it and made some of the electronic components water resistant.

 

it will eventually dry out, you probably got water in the plugs. just keep driving it.

 

yea usually the more you keep driving it, the more it will slowly dry up and return to norman. My dad did this on his truck, cars engine was flutterring and it would shake when you would throttle, after a couple days when the engine dried up, it went away. Ofcourse, this is assuming you didnt cause permanent damage to anything but good luck either way

 

hmm why would the check engine light be on then?
I wouldn't feel comfortable driving the car around the way it drives, is there a way to speed up this drying process or to actually check the cap for damage?

Thanks

 

ummm NO do not keep driving it...you'll only make things worse. You need to dry things out properly....take the distributor cap off and dry it out (It cannot suffer "water damage" despite what was previously posted) you just need to get everything as dry as you can.....compressed air would be a great help in drying out the distributor...now you need to get all the water out from around the spark plugs....again, compressed air would help, and may keep you from having to pull the TB off.

If the check engine light is on, its prob throwing a missfire code because of the water in the ignition system......hopefully you havn't been driving like that long enough to damage the catalytic converter, or O2 sensors.

 

this same thing happened to me last week and water got into the idle speed controll valve, cleaned it with carb cleaner and been running fine ever since

 

and where exactly is that located??
Ill clean it out right away!

 

Next time you wash your engine leave it running when you hose it down. I did this exact same thing to a Prelude I had a bunch of years ago.. I ended up getting a bunch of water into the spark plugs. I was told that if you leave the car running any water that hits the spark plugs will evaporate immediately.. Next time I washed it I left it running and had no problems..

 

I cant tell you how many times Ive seen this happen on CL. Please read the forum rules before posting.