Leeviathan

The check engine light came on before the alternator took a dump. In the next few days I'll try and clear the codes and see if they come back. Then I'll check all the connections and stuff. After the holiday ill have a talk with my mechanic and have him check the timing too. Thanks for everyones input!

I'll look into the speedo cable insight.

The CEL stuff presages the alternator problems. I'll talk to them though. They might have some insight. Thanks!

Oh and it's an automatic.

The speedo stopped around the same time the check engine light came on. Forgot to include that also. As far as the alt goes, my car wouldn't start at all one day as I was coming out of a store. I got a jump. It drove for about 15 minutes and died. I got a new battery and tested the alternator and it wasn't charging the battery at all. I changed it out with an alternator I got from oreillys. That lasted two months and then the car died again. I took it into the shop because I assumed that since it was a new alternator that couldn't be the problem. The shop just told me that I had gotten a crappy alternator. That's all I know about that. I didn't get too far into that one. Sorry for the lack of info.

Thanks for the imput. I did recently get a new timing belt put on when i had to take it in to have the water pump replaced. That was before I started having all of this trouble. Forgive the dumb question but would a screw up in the timing cause all of these problems?

It runs fine for a while, then after a while it starts to get a little rough and then it feels like it starts to idle really low and feel like it's about to stall. Then the check engine light will go off and it will run fine and then it will come back on.......and so on and so forth.

Hi. New to the board here but since joining it seems like I'm on here everyday. This is my first post and I'm sorry if it's a bit of a doozy. Anyway, I recently had an alternator fail on me, replaced it, had that one fail on me, and then had the new one replaced by a shop by my house (would have done it myself but since I had just replaced the alternator I figured that it couldn't be that!). Shortly before the first alternator failed on me the check engine light started coming on sporadically. After finally getting the final alternator installed, the check engine light went off only to return a day or so later. ....So, I got the trouble codes from the obd and I have some questions about them. 13-Cam position sensor 14-fuel injector 1 24-air control valve 33-vehicle speed sensor 35-canister purge solenoid valve I've found where most of these faulty parts are except the vehicle speed sensor but I'll get to that in a second. All of the parts I've located seem pretty simple to replace (I'm new to the whole working on my own car but I'm a pretty handy guy) and I'm pretty sure I can find them at my local auto salvage yard. My questions are these: What should I look for as far as the condition of the parts that I find? Is it as simple as hooking it up to a multimeter to see if they are functioning correctly? What if anything should I check first before I start digging into swapping out parts? I've also read that replacing the whole fuel injector rail is easier than replacing an individual injector on my car. Is this fairly accurate? Could the failing alternator have affected these things and could it be a symptom of a larger problem? And lastly, where the heck is the vehicle speed sensor? I need to get my emissions tested to renew my tabs and I get the feeling that all of these issues affect the emissions. Anyway, thanks in advance for any help or advice in this. I love this site. It's already been extremely helpful for me. But moreover, I love my car and I want to help it get healthy. Thanks. Lee