2000 silhouette sputtering,dying,intermittently runs fine

[gmo320]

Hello to everyone, I'm new here and hope posting this is ok. For two months now I've been dealing with my 2000 silo, 3.4l doing this to me. Started out with just when it rained or was raining outside it was really hard to start and when it did it would run really rough and bad. Until it warmed up and then it was fine. Then it turned into driving along and out of no where running bad, popping, sputtering, backfire, shaking, rpms to zero then come back, and then all of a sudden it would be ok. Mind you all of this without a service engine light. Well finally the light came on. Pulled the code at autozone and it said crankshaft sensor. Cool, changed it good to go. You guys know, not that easy. Van starts doing it again, pull the code, same thing, crank sensor. So change it again, no good, change MAS, no good, camshaft sensor, no good, finally went for the computer, no good, mind you we had the meter out and was checking these things also. Which brings me here, 2 hours of reading looking 4 a fix. The only consistent thing I read was two other people found melted wires after they had worked on their van.
So here's the fix, facing your motor, right side of the ignition control module is a plug with two wires, purple and yellow. They go to the second crankshaft sensor on the back of the motor. The wire runs from the ignition control module down next to the exhaust manifold through a small space, and over to the crank sensor. Unplug both ends and pull out the 18 inch harnes and you'll find 2 inches of bare exposed wire that was laying against the exhaust causing all of these mysterious problems. Fix the wire and plug it back into the ignition control module, run it down by the tranny dipstick tube and then across to the sensor. Zip tie it to the tube and you should be good to go.
Thanks alot for this site, it helped me out alot and saved me a trip to the dealer.

[merc81]

Excellent, excellent post. I know that wire you speak of! It never did that to any of the vans I've worked on, but I always install a plastic wire sleeve protector and as you mentioned, wire tie it up off the exhaust. Every engine I see has that wire all melted and funky. It feeds the crank position signal into the iginition moduele.

Hopefully there are other poor suckers like us that are able to profit from your experience. It sounds like you really paid dearly for that knowledge!
John

[463]

thanks for the infro. found the same problem on a 98 grand am gt with a 3.1 v6. did the reroute and new loom. the wires were'nt cooked. those wires were to close to the EGR valve and pipes. ps i will take a close look at the 02 van real soon.

[rockwood84]

mine did this and it turned out to be the fuelpump it would only pump 5 pounds pressure then pump 45 pounds. when it would pump a low pressure the van would miss,jump,buck,pop,and backfire.then twenty minutes later it would run as smooth and go as fast as you wanted it to.it caused the cranksensor , camshaft sensor and tps codes to pop up. and one note the intake gaskets do not like backfiring at all. it causes them fine and quality made plastic gaskets to crack.we ended up running it around with a fuel pressure gauge hooked to the fuel line and gauge so we could see it.