Today My car suddenly started miss-firing and rough idling real hard, i pop the hood and the valve cover gasket has failed, oil ended up filling the spark plug wells and into the coil pack. I replaced the valve cover gasket and spark plugs and cleaned out the coil pack with electronic cleaner and it started back up, runs much better now, however that rough idle is still there. I cant really tell if its a missfire or a rough idle caused by something else. It has had this rough idle before but it usually went away for several months after a short drive. The roughness goes away at highway speed. Im thinking its either the coilpack got ruined by the oil, or its something else. Its really hard for me to buy a coil pack they are expensive. The computer shows only one engine code which is p705, which is the TCM, that is also expensive and has been giving me trouble going off and on for a while, could that also be causing a rough idle? I checked for vacuum leaks by spraying brake cleaner on the vacuum lines but nothing happened. Also i have been a fan of scotty kilmer on youtube for quite a while, great channel say awesome and thanks for all the help.
More than likely one or more of your coil packs got soaked with oil is shorting to ground and causing the missfire(s). Generally speaking you should have a code for missfire as in example: P0301 would be miss fire at cyl #1. If you have mulltiple missfires you would get P0300 indicating more than one missfire. You might try to re-clean them and try to get the oil resedue out and see if there is an improvement hopefully.
Ill try that, i looked it up coil packs are not as expensive as i thought so i might get one and swap it out to see if it fixes it.
okay sounds good..good luck
I came back to report that replacing the coil pack has fixed the issue, its running better then ever now. All it needed was new sparkplugs and a coilpack. It never did give a code for missfire, but i inspected the plugs which where new when i put them in, and one clearly had never fired all new and shiney still. Im also thinking the nutreal safty switch was a side effect of the missfire. But thats not confirmed as i still have a code for that, i just have to drive it a while and see if the switch acts up.
Alright it was great you got this all resolved - HAPPY NEW YEARS AS WELL!
Neutral safety switch - more than likely you get a code as the ECM does not detect the shifter in N but does in others. More than likely it is just the switch is defective and just needs to be replaced but it does not affect your engine performance. It may even be a just a bad connection so check that or a pin thats slipped out...Check it out.
Oh, ill check it out. But the switch only acts up intermittidly, and i think sense it goes by engine rpm, which has always acted funny till that coil pack was replaced and now runs perfectly, that might had something to do with it. It also starts right up after being gassed up, which before it would have trouble starting after fueling up.
The reason for the engine not starting up is because if it does not detect P or N it will ASSUME its in gear and when it starts up ithe car will move. It does not detect any park brake engagement so it doesn't care. Its a safety measure
That would make sense except for when i gave it some gas it would start up. And now after replacing the coilpack and spark plugs it no longer has this issue.
Before, it had trouble shifting between gears, sometimes going as high as 6000 rpm before finally switching gears, that issue has also been fixed by replacing spark plugs and coil pack.
Im thinking that sense it was having issues with the rpm, the Safty switch would kick in sometimes and put the car in "safe mode" and show a safty switch trouble code. It was clearly missfiring without a doubt. I think all the problems stemmed from that bad coil pack, it was probably bad the entire time just the valve cover leaking into it finally did it in completely. Well know for sure after a few months of driving if it the safty switch ever acts up again.
i would not be so sure as to assume that the problem you have are inter related into one particular one. I have never heard of a coil pack which would cause a Neutral safety switch fault - they are seperate system totally. In your ealier comment you say Quote: "nutreal safty switch was a side effect of the missfire.." quote unquote. Side effect in what way ? The NSS is not part of any of the ignition operation. but the ECM goes into limp mode when it does not detect the NSS properly. Thats a safety measure as i pointed out previously. But not missfires exclisively. So you see you have or had two problems but solved one. Check out the Saturnfans.com site.
and yes..I owned a Saturn as well SC-2.
From what ive read about it the safty switch measures rpm from the engine to ensure safe gear switching. My logic is if the rpm is all over the place because of a bad coil pack the safty switch might make false positives, when it did act up, just restarting the engine got it out of safe mode. Its just a theory that i hope is true. It has not acted up In a while.
yeah send me the link on HOW the neutral safety switch can send RPM data to anything....it wouldbe most enlightening..