Stalling under Acceleration (ST162)

[Franko]

Ok, last week my Celica ('86, ST162) had a regular service, my uncle and I replaced the plugs, oil, coolant, oil filter, air filter, brake pads and tranny fluid. Car was running great that day and night, next day I drove it to work (25~km one way trip, including 100km/h roads) and it was also fine.

On the way home, stopped at the lights (idled normal), go to take off and the car stalled... Now the car will constantly stall if I put the foot down and make it accelerate a little bit fast. If I accelerate slowly it will go right up to 4k+ RPM, but if I put my foot down heavy at any point the car coughs, splutters and will stall if you do it hard enough. The car can be driven if accelerated slowly and RPM kept well above 2K (though I havent been driving it in fear of making it worse). I also can smell petrol while this is happening...

Had the RAC out, they diagnosed it as "an electrical problem" (car is EFI), cleant my distributor (had some corrosion crap on it), said the car was sparking fine, checked the AFM (I think thats what it is, he just cleant the terminals). During the inspection, the guy was fiddling with the throttle and eventually the car blew exhaust/smoke out the intake! Scary stuff! The RAC bloke said "its trying to run backwards" (he repeated this many times, which confused me somewhat... never heard of that before)

I have the car booked in for a free diagnostic (get 1 free per year, woohoo) at the service centre, but before I take it there I was hoping that someone could give some suggestions to the problem so I know what to expect. As this point I am guessing its just a coincedence that this happened after the service

Sorry for ze long post!

[Dale]

check your ecu for error codes, then check your timing with a timing light (it should be 10deg BTDC) the timing belt might have slipped a tooth or be damaged

other than that it's most likely a AFM or tps problem (that said one a 3sge will run with the tps unplugged anyway)

is it a 3sge or a 3sfe?

[Franko]

Forgot to add that, its a 3SGE.

I wanted to check for codes, but have no idea what pins to short on the diagnosis panel I will have to have a google and find out..

[Dale]

t and e1, there will be a sticker of it on the underside to tell you what pins are which

http://www.gtfours.co.uk/ has a good howto on how to check error codes, and also has a list of what each one is... just use the 165 section it is accurate enough for a 162

also use the thread seach function in the "st162 dedicated thread" in general car talk, there's a lot of info scattered through there

[Franko]

Awesome, thanks for that - its a really good site

Originally it was getting error 24 (air temp sensor) and error 51 (idle or a/c signal... my AC is broken so that could be the cause of that).

I thought that it could be an old code still stored in the ECU, so I reset the ECU, checked codes and now I am only getting error 51.

Will do some reading and see if anyone else has had this (its a pain because you cant search for "51"!)