I had the distributor cap and rotor replaced with the spark plugs and wires, so those are good.yanga001 wrote: ↑11 Feb 2024, 11:11 I would say a decision needs to be made if you want to dive into more DIY and fix your car yourself or trust some run of the mill mechanics.
I know there are good mechanics out there, but normally you need to develop a pretty good relationship with them before they start really listening to the details and ideas your provide them. I would recommend buying an obd2 scanner which can check live data of the car. That way you can pull your own codes and check things such as fuel trims, engine timing, etc.
To me it almost sounds like a vac leak as the car seems to start properly but will intermittently die.
To work on these cars you need the following:
A torque wrench: see if you can get 20ftpds-100ftpds range. That will cover spark plugs, any brake calipers and wheel lugs
A socket set: you only need a few of the metric sizes, i cant rattle them off the top of my head but a 100$ set on sale should do. (8mm,9mm,10mm,12mm,13mm,14mm,16mm,18mm,19mm)
a hammer
a screw driver set
Did he check the distributor cap and rotor. Sometimes they can get a bit contaminated, and can go bad if oil leaks into them.
If it happens again, and you do have a scanner then write down what misfire it occurred on.
One cylinder misfire could point to a bad injector/potential issue on the rotor/cap. Constant multi-cylinder misfires are a bit wider and could point to Mass air flow sensor/Cam_crank position sensor/vac leaks/fuel filter etc.
Mechanics only see your car for 3-4 hours at a time, you live with it so you will have a much better feeling of what triggers the issue.
Hope this helps!
Edit:
Is 93 octane in the states the same as 91 up here? 91 is more than enough for our engines.
Here we have 87/89/91/93. May save you a bit of coin
We do have 91 here, but we it’s difficult to find. Barely any gas stations have it.






