Hopefully someone can help me out here...just recently, my car started dying while shifting. It feels as if the shifter is sticking a bit in gear when I shift and sometimes when it sticks, the car will cut out while I'm still rolling. I recently rebuilt my slave cylinder and the clutch feels very smooth, just maybe not engaging all the way? Today was the worst day, same thing happened while driving and while I was still coasting, I popped the clutch to restart the engine and when it restarted, it started making a horrible grinding noise. I quickly shifted back to neutral, which again killed the engine and then restarted the car w/ the start button. The grinding noise was gone, but then came back intermittently on my way home when I pushed in the clutch (not everytime, but maybe every 3rd or 4th time shifting). Another weird sympton is when the car cuts out after shifting, the battery seems to be almost completely drained. On one occassion last week, I was left stranded in the middle of I95 b/c the battery (only 2 wks old at the time) was completely discharged. When it happened again today, it took a couple tries to get the car to fire back up b/c the battery was struggling w/ power. The battery is only a couple weeks old and I had it tested at Advanced Auto and it came back good?? Sorry for the long post, just wanted to get all the symptoms listed in the hopes someone can help me out. BTW, the car is MY00 with Spugen Turbo (only boosted about 500 miles total). I don't believe it has anything to do w/ the turbo, but I really don't know. Thanks for looking--

 

My concern is if you have a turbo and AEM ems installed that the shut off can be related to that,grinding is mechanical - tranny problems,Bad sinchro and Gear,and about the battery it seems that your battery-bad wireing.
write everything you have,and is this all the time - before you got boosted or just now after 500 miles?

 

Thanks...the car has a Spugen Turbo kit (turbonetics 60-1) w/ 575cc inline pro injectors, run thru AEM EMS 1052. I'm currently running at 10psi boost on stock compression. The car was tuned by Inline Pro a couple months back. The battery is the ole WalMart special, but as I mentioned it is brand new and I had it tested after the first time it died (in the middle of the highway). I don't have any excessive draw on the battery (aftermarket stereo, 4 spkrs, alarm, but no sub and no amps). I put a voltmeter on the battery last nite after it cut out on me on the road and it's reading 14.5volts. I followed the wiring (+) and can't find any cuts, frays, or places where it would ground out. In fact, the wiring looks nearly brand new w/ no visible wear anywhere in the engine bay. AFter the car was tuned by Inline Pro, it ran great....it only recently started cutting out last week (after about 500 boosted miles). In fact, the week prior, I drove the car without incident 250 miles roundtrip for a weekend getaway with no problems. Prior to being boosted, I never had a single problem w/ the car...I'm completely at a loss Since it's been boosted, I've bled the clutch, all the brakes, put in a supra krankvent, and changed the oil. While I was doing all this work, the car's old battery (at the time only 9 mos old), completely died (to where I couldn't even get the dash lights to come on). This is why I replaced the battery w/ the Walmart special. I was thinking something must be draining the battery while it's sitting, b/c it was sitting in my garage for approx 6 wks while I did all the aforementioned maintenance. I didn't think 6 wks of not starting the car would kill a fairly new battery, but then I really didn't think much about it. Any ideas? Another thought I had is that perhaps I need to re-bleed the clutch (I did a gravity bleed on it) and that's why it's not disengaging completely, causing the engine to cut out? But I still can't figure out the battery deal...

 

The grind and stall might be unrelated.

I can't see the clutch causing the engine to die. Grind the transmission yes, make it hard to shift gears yes, but kill the engine? Only if it jams the flywheel and locks up the motor, in which case I can't imaging it would start again.

You didn't mention what happens when the car dies. Does the instrument panel die too? I assume the ignition stays "ON" because you were able to pop the clutch and start the car again, but have you noticed the instruments blinking out and back on when the stall happens?

If a new battery "went dead while driving" and the battery later tests OK, then you must have a charging problem. A charging problem could be a bad alternator or a bad connection somewhere, and a bad connection could also cause the engine to die. And it could cause a good battery to appear to be dead (depending on where you put the meter to measure the voltage). It might be worth it to temporarily install a volt meter to watch the voltage at the fuse box, that would at least give you a warning if the system stops charging.

Also, bear in mind it could be something with the turbo or AEM install. If a wiring problem caused the injectors to quit, even for a fraction of a second, the car would die.

I don't have any experience with the wiring for the AEM but here's an interesting story about a Comptech SC install where the engine stalled every time the AC was turned on. It didn't matter what the rpm or engine load was, if you hit the AC button the engine died. If you hit the button again to turn the AC off, the engine came back to life. It was funny as hell, especially since it wasn't my car.

As it turns out, the installer didn't follow the instructions on wiring the ESM module - he "knew what he was doing" and wired the Comptech ESM (controls the MAP signal) to a red wire coming out of the ECM that had 12v when the ignition was ON and no power when the ignition was OFF. Unfortunately it wasn't an ignition power circuit; it was the compressor clutch circuit. When the AC was off the wire had +12v on it, back-feeding through the compressor clutch winding. But when you turned AC on, the ECM grounded that wire to activate the compressor and killed power to the ESM, causing the MAP signal to go away, so the ECM cut fuel back to near-nothing, causing the stall.

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I had an odd experience with an electrical problem too. Whenever I turned on my blinker, it would kill the car. Found out later that there was some nasty goop in the steering column. I know that didn't help but wish you luck finding a solution.

 

Thanks for the feedback, Modifry. When the car stalls, the car is always moving (b/c it stalls when I shift, usually from first to second....only when I feel the stick not wanting to disengage and I end up forcing it out of gear, thereby killing the engine) and I can't even tell the engine is dead until I look at the instrument cluster and notice all the lights on (ie. battery, oil, etc....all the lights that normally come on when you first turn the key on). Since I'm usually coasting at this point, I push in the clutch and give the start button a try. The first time this happened, the battery was so dead, the car wouldn't even turn over. After this incident, I took the battery to be tested (at Advance Auto) and they said all was good. I reinstalled the battery and drove for no more than 1.5 miles before the car stalled again while shifting. This time the battery was able to start the car, but struggled very badly...it barely turned the car over, but did get it started (keep in mind this is after recharging the battery and then driving only a mile or two). On this 2 mile trip home, the car stalled 3 times while pulling the shifter out of gear A gearhead friend of mine at work said that the grinding and difficulty disengaging sounded like a bad throwout bearing, but couldn't figure out the battery issue or the engine cutout. What's confusing me so much is why the car ran so flawlessly for the first 400 or so miles after tuning, and now all of a sudden, it stalls everytime I go to shift

 

Your description of the "stick not wanting to disengage" makes me think the engine is stalling immediately when you depress the clutch. I assume you also lift the throttle when you shift?

I can think of a few things to consider:

1. The ECM cuts the injectors if the throttle is closed and the engine rpm is above 1000. This saves fuel and cuts emissions. When the rpm drops to 1000 the ECM turns the injectors back on. At least it does on a stock car. Maybe the EMS is not detecting "closed throttle" correctly or maybe it needs to start firing the injectors at like 1200 or 1500 rpm. Is that adjustable? I know some early turbo users had this problem where the engine did not recover from the "injector cut" at closed throttle. I do not know what the fix was, just remember reading the posts.

2. If the above is a possibility have you tried shifting without completely lifting off the gas? If you try that, does the car still stall?

3. Just for grins you might try bypassing the clutch switches so the car thinks the clutch is depressed all the time. While that shouldn't have anything to do with the stalling it's an easy thing to try and rules out and electrical issue with the clutch switches.

4. Your scenario where "the battery was re-charged, the car was driven only a few miles when it stalled again, and after the stall the battery had trouble cranking the engine" sounds like a bad connection somewhere. Unless somebody left a wrench across the battery terminals it simply cannot go dead in a few miles so the slow cranking is either a third problem or it's related to the stalling, which points (again) to a bad or loose wire in the alternator/battery/main power wiring.

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