Comments for 1993 Toyota Camry, Died and Won't Start

Oct 17, 2009
Rating

Crazy, crazy problem
by: Barry Kratzer

I have a 1993 Camry 3.0 that showed a lot of the symptoms of these poor guys with the cars that died and/or wouldn't start. My wife has been driving it with it bucking when you take off, and
sometimes missing, and then shutting off. But it usually started back up right away. But you had to really feather the gas to get it going. Then at higher speeds it ran fine. I changed the front motor mount and the dogbone, and that helped the bucking some, but didn't eliminate it. The mount was broken and the dogbone was worn out. Well, on the way home Thursday night it quit a few times, but started back up, until the last time. It wouldn't star and the battery died real fast when trying to start it. Well, after searching through the factory Toyota manual, I decided to try to check the fire, as the manual describes. The coil had spark when you held it 1/2 inch away from the body, as described. So I decided to check the timing, to see if the belt had slipped, as the motor turned over really fast after a battery charge. Well, I got no fire to the plug or flash through the timing light. Then I pulled the distributor cap off and looked at the rotor. It looked OK, but just for the hell of it, I decided to put a new cap and rotor on it. Well, much to my surprise, when I pulled the rotor off and looked at it close, it was burned through the bottom side and cracked in a few places. It was shorting out from the coil wire contact with the rotor through the bottom to the steel wheel that the rotor screws onto. I have NEVER, EVER had this problem before. and I am 67 and been a shadetree since I was 16. Sorry for rambling on, but I wanted you to try to understand the whole problem, as it had me baffled. At the top of this page it says to rate this page?? How can you rate your own page??