I have a 96 grand caravan ES 3.8l. Yesterday at a stop light when the light turned green and I went to go the engine just died. I thought maybe I ran out of gas (gas gauge doesn't work) but I've only drove about 100 miles before my last fill up. Also it didn't act up for a little bit like when I run the gas low, it just stalled out of nowhere. No check engine light

When I got it towed home I tried to start the engine it sounds like it wants to turn over sometimes and I'm getting intake backfire sometimes too. later at night it started up but was really rough and died after a few seconds. This morning It started up still a little rough, I had to keep the rpm at around 2k to keep the engine from wanting to bog out, then after a minute or 2 you could feel it just bog down and die.

I checked the fuel pressure and I have 45psi at the rail and can hear the pump whir up when turning key to position 2. So now to the spark side of things, what are some good tests to run? How would I check the coil pack and CPS to see if they are working correctly?

I have the snap on mt2500 but I'm waiting for the K13 key I need to show up in the mail, might be a little while.

 

Sounds like it may have jumped time.

 

I did some more testing and found that only one of the coils in the coil pack was firing for cylinders 2 and 5, at the connector I found that the computer is only signaling the 2/5 coil and not the other 2. On cold start up it will fire all of them up and then gradually dies to just the 2/5 cylinders firing after a couple minutes of reving the engine.

So now I'm down to the camshaft sensor, the crankshaft sensor, or the PCM itself. I'm thinking it could be one of the sensors since it starts on cold start and then gradually starts misfiring until it dies out.

Are there any test's I can do to the Cam and crank sensors without a diagnostic machine?

 

All right, it came down to faulty camshaft sensor. up and running now!

 

Good to hear you got it fixed.