Stinky Smell At WOT On '97 LSC

thaywood

thaywood

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Okay here's a good one. My wife's '97 LSC runs great, has gobs of power, and is superfast. But when you nail the gas to pass someone or just to "blow it out", it stinks up the interior with a sulfur/rotten egg smell. It's horrible. The first thing I thought of was stopped up cats. But I doubt that since the engine runs at normal operating temp all the time and it has plenty of power, runs perfectly smooth, and has instant throttle response with no bogging. I just replaced the fuel filter and air filter and seafoamed it recently as well. Next thing I considered was O2 sensors. Then stopped up EGR valve. Anyone ever had this problem and if so, what did it end up being? I'm planning to clean the EGR and seafoam it again this weekend. Help?
 
ohhhh, get ready for fun. My car has never run right since mine have been done. A year later and I'm still trying to work out the kinks....
 
Well. In that case. Maybe I'll get a couple of those universal cats off ebay and put them on. It's irritating. The car runs so good right now, I shudder to think how much better it would act with a good set of cats:). Right now, with TC off, from a dead standstill it will literally melt the rear tires off until you let up on the gas enough for it to catch some traction. It's amazing.
 
mine did it for alittle while but it went away..iirc it only happened when it was colder out
 
Well how old are your O2s? You mentioned them. That was my problem. New O2s cleared it up pretty much right away. The smell does not usually mean bat cats, its means they are working overtime.

Keep in mind that if you do O2s, you only do the two upstream (forward) O2s. They are heated and will have four wires. ALWAYS rent the helper tool kit if you can, it does help a lot. Passenger side is a total PITA!
 
2 new 02's will be cheaper than aftermarket cats, i'd try the 02's first, if that doesnt solve it, i'll give you derek's number, you can borrow his " dead on " tool.
 
Mine is doing the same thing, i am almost afraid to stomp on it because of it. Same exact smell. I always think something is just burning and its got to be horrible for the car lol. Please let me know if you do it, mine too are original...

i always reference it to "burning popcorn" smell lol and it is ONLY when i go WOT or giving it alot of gas.

Thaywood let me know if you do the o2 sensor swap and it if fixes the problem, i am doing rotors soon and il do that also if it fixes it. Or if its just cheap.

Also Unity you said only do the two front ones?

So two of these senors ?

http://www.oreillyauto.com/site/c/d...+sensor&forcedVehicle=true&pt=02205&ppt=C0018
 
Could always put the car on a proper reader and make sure the front O2 sensors are responding quickly enough and that the rears are doing their job of checking.

Rear O2s when they go bad will 90% of the time give you a MIL. Their only job in life is to tell you if the cats are working or not. A front O2 will more then likely cause the issue of smelly cats (I love that song) and is because its reacting slow. If it completly failed then you would get a MIL for bad S1 circuit and the engine would go into its base program and limp itself so it dont accidently go lean.
Sounds like your problem is a slow reacting O2 sensor causing the smell BUT the second O2 should have tripped a lean or rich code on that bank.

SO ****take this with a grain of salt as I am not ASE***** if you have a S2 Lean/rich code with no others then its 70% front O2 and 30% cat as being the cause.
If there is no code but you have the smell then its either BOTH sensors are dirty and failing but happen to be failing in similar ranges (unlikely as they will fail all the way) OR the cat is just no longer good. Cats only have to last 80,000 miles. Thats their life expectance although most get double that.

Really you need to have it on a scanner to tell ya which sensor is out of range and if they are all in range then ya know you need cats.


Me, if it were not for the fact the car would be louder then I wanted then I would have removed mine months ago.
 
Mine used to do it all of the time to until i removed the 3rd cat (resonator)and put in the double x pipes.I havent had to smell it since.
 
So should i even replace them you think? Not exactly cheap...
 
The car is going to the shop in a couple of weeks for some exhaust work and passenger side door handle install (cuz I don't wanna mess with it:D). Basically, I was originally going to replace the stock mufflers with a pair of Thrush glass packs. So, while they're in there, I'll get them to remove that third cat and put an x-pipe in there. Since it's an LSC, there's no resonator downstream of the 3rd cat. If that doesn't get rid of the smell, I'll do the O2 sensors next. Those dam things are expensive as hell.
 
actaully for a set of 4 bosch o2 sensors are 155.00(39.72 ech) rockauto.com. if u go locally there 57.99 each at advance/auto/orielys i did my research last night. I have to do mine as well
 
Like I said, expensive as hell. I'm on a shoestring budget. Getting the exhaust work and door handle is going to be close to $200 bucks. That's gonna hurt. But we don't get to do much frivolous spending very often. So this is like a treat. Now if the O2 sensors were like $20 bucks each, I'd go get a pair right now. I can afford $40 a lot easier than $80 right now. And it may turn out that we can't get the exhaust done. It just depends on how much money we have at the time. Our money situation is literally a day-to-day thing. And it sucks tremendously. There are so many things I want to do to both cars, but we just can't afford it.:(

Edit: I just found a 4-wire O2 sensor on Ebay for $26.24 with free shipping that should fit the Mark VIII. http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/SMP-...ptZMotorsQ5fCarQ5fTruckQ5fPartsQ5fAccessories

I may have to try it.
 
You poor OBD2 guys... I couldnt fathom paying what you all do for new o2 sensors... I sure am glad I've only got 2 o2 sensors, OBD1, and no cat's! lol
 
not in nc they go over the whole car and its 50 bucks with window tint
 
94BLU8 said:
not in nc they go over the whole car and its 50 bucks with window tint
Click to expand...

Not where I live in NC:cool:. $13.60 is what it cost me to get my '96 inspected last week. And all I had to do was turn my lights on and show that my turn signals work. That's it. :)

Now there are other counties around here that are OBD2. And if my car were registered there, it would cost thirty-plus dollars and I couldn't get the '96 inspected because it has a CEL right now because the smog pump is not working. So it works out nicely for me to have them registered in a non-ODB county.
 
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