QuestionMy mother-in-law is wanting to give us a 1985 Chrysler New Yorker. It was my father-in-laws car. He passed away last December, but very rarely drove it. It has a 4 cylinder turbo with about 200,000 miles. I'm being told it has a power loss. My brother-in-law, who is a decent machanic, {retired Air Force flight line mechanic} has done a complete tune up, and repaired a couple of vacumn hoses. He has not checked the compression due to a dead battery. He is leaning toward a bad turbo body. What else should I be looking for?
Tom
AnswerHi Tom,
In addition to a compression test, has your brother-in-law checked the engine control unit to see whether it has noticed any malfuncitions which it classifies as coded two digit numbers in its memory?
The most useful thing to do would be to try to get the fault codes that are likely stored in the engine controller memory to readout. Try using the ignition key: turn it "on-off-on-off-on" and leave it "on" (doing this quickly, no longer than 5 seconds). Then watch the 'check engine' light to begin flashing, then pause, flashing, pause, etc. Count the number of flashes before each pause and keep track of the numbers. Repeat the readout and verify the counts are correct. Then group them in pairs in the order that they came out, thus forming two digit numbers. You may notice that the pause is shorter between the digits of a given number, and longer between the numbers themselves. Then send me a 'follow-up' question telling me the results of your readout. By the way, 55 will be the last number (two groups of 5 flashes each) and that is the code for "end of readout".
I have the troubleshooting manual for the turbo I engine and we can look up the possibilities of what is wrong based upon what fault codes you show.
There is also an essay on fault codes at the site:
http://www.allpar.com/fix/codes.html
which gives the meaning of the code numbers. But then you need to get specific info for what exactly might be the diagnostic tests or parts to replace to complete the repair.
Roland
