454 troubles

Hi I am new here. I bought a 1996 chevy 4 door already lowered in September aka money pit. It was warm when I bought it and now that it is colder all the problems came out and did they ever. It started with a miss and stumble, so I did the easy stuff first, cap, rotor, wires, plugs, and fuel filter. Still there. Then checked fuel pressure. It was 50psi and went down when you revved it up and it also bleed down after you shut it off very quickly. So clamped off the return line and still did it. So I ordered a set of injectors and an egr valve from 5.0 motorsports. I also bought a new regulator to put in while I had the upper intake off. Put that all in and my bleed down almost went away. I also put a coolant temperature sensor in too because the weather pack gasket looked warped out and read about the leaking and messing up the plug. Took for a drive and it still was not right. I had also noticed that the distributor (cam sensor) was unplugged. Plugged back in . Now a service engine code. Also checked fuel pressure and now with the new regulator the pressure was bouncing all around and was lower that before. Rev it and it would go into the middle 40s. So I ordered a whole pump assembly. Put that in and it is better but still only has 50 psi at idle and goes up with the rims. I read that everyone says it should be 58 to 62. It is a Delphi pump. With each thing I have done it does seem to be better. I had a buddy bring in his scanner to day to see what the code is. It was a p1345 which is camshaft to crankshaft position correlation fault. I had the timing checked at a garage and it was spot on. So I was seeing if anyone one had any ideas on all my all my problems. I hear the the code could be the distributor gear being worn. I probably have $1100 in it in the past 3 months and that is with me doing all the work. And it also has a new battery in too as of Sunday. So I am about at wits end with it! Hopefully I can get some help. Thank you.


Shannon

Well I figured i would update this since I had no replies. It was a timing issue and it is very important that when setting the timing that the engine is at operating temperature. When you would fire it up and check the cam retard on the scanner it read 0 ,then when it was at operating temperature it read -17. The garage I took it to must have pulled it in and never warmed it up and checked/set the timing. They checked it 2 or 3 different times and then I took it to another garage. Now it is correct with no light. Now it runs great and has no more cold stumble now that the timing is correct.


Shannon

Glad you got it going, in the first post though you told us the timing was correct.

Kidding aside generally you don't look at these Vortecs in terms of how the timing is set; you're looking at the cam retard angle which is something not all scanners can read and you sure as heck aren't setting it with a timing light.

But regardless of Vortec, TBI, old skewl, whatever - timing should be set with the engine at normal operating temperature. So yeah, if the previous shop that set it didn't warm it up...shame on them.

The up side is that if it had any significant miles on it you'd want those injectors and new regulator in there anyway, as well as a new pump, filter, and tune-up parts too. So there's a big chunk of the money you spent, well-spent, regardless.

P1345 pretty much always comes down to two things. Distributor not adjusted properly because it was removed for one reason or another (lower intake gaskets, distributor replacement, etc.) or the distributor is worn to shit which is pretty common once these hit about 150K or so.

Richard

someotherguy, yes, it was driving me crazy. I was going off of what they had told me about the timing(cam retard). I ended up borrowing a scanner so I could see if I could figure anything out. But the $200 scanner do not have the cam retard on it. So I could only go off what they told me till I went to another garage.You would have figured that they would have know that though. Like you said, I did replace a bunch of stuff that needed replaced. There was a few things that I probably did not need to replace but at least they are new now. I plan of keeping this truck for a while.


Shannon