1998 Chevy Pick up won’t start

1998 Chevy Pick up won’t start

My Dad called the other day to say that his Chevy Pick Up would not start. We began by checking the usual suspects, spark and fuel.

I used my inductive spark checker held to a plug wire and it indicated that we had spark. I put my hand over the exhaust pipe and it smelled like we had fuel. Hmm.

We tried the clear flood procedure even though it did not seem flooded. Still not start.

The next night I returned with my fuel pressure tester and timing light. We checked the fuel pressure and found 50 psi. We guessed that was enough even though the spec is 55 to 60.

We had noticed that the spark was intermittent on the tester which could have been form the way I was holding it or maybe from a bad cap or rotor. So dad bought a new cap and rotor to add to the new spark plug wires and air filter he had installed previously.

We tried to check the timing and could not find any marks on the damper. I hooked up our antique timing light anyway and found that it does a poor job of insulating the voltage from a modern high energy ignition system.

He called a mechanic friend of his who came over and hooked up the OBDII tester. The tester shoed no error codes and showed the timing to be correct. Glad to have our fears of a broken timing chain put aside. But it still would not start. His friend suggested that 50 psi was not enough fuel pressure to start the truck but I was doubtful.

I went back to help Dad move the truck to his shop so he could begin the process of removing the bed and swapping out the fuel pump. I checked to see if it might be a problem with the idle air control circuit but that seemed OK as well.

Once we had towed, tugged pushed and pulled the truck into place in the shop I decided to try one lat thing before I left. I poured some gas down the throttle body and sure enough it fired up. In fact it stayed running and ran just fine.

I went to hook up the fuel pressure tester again and the engine instantly died. I hooked it to the test port and again the engine would not start. We hit it with another splash of fuel and it started and again ran fine. Seems the low fuel pressure was not low enough to keep it form running but was low enough to keep it from starting when cool.

We tried it several more times and sometimes it would start without assistance but most times it would not. So Dad is now pulling the bed to swap the fuel pump.