[drumvudu]

Hi, on my 88 2.3L mustang, I start the car and it idles down fine and is nice and smooth. After it runs for a little bit, the idle will suddenly drop way down to 300rpms or so you can hardly keep it running but if you give it allot of gas the power will still come on strong once you get it up above 3500 or so. Now, when you are driving, you will be going along just fine and normal and then all of the sudden if you are simply trying to hold the car at a constant rate of speed, it will drop rpms and miss horrendously until you rev it way up or floor it to get more power. Again, after the motor revs up a bit, the power will begin to come on strong. But, if you come to a stop in drive, the idle will come way back down again and almost die. The motor sounds like it is running on two cyl's when it does this and smells funny. Almost a "lean" smell. Not a very rich gas smell. While this is happening, I can put the car in park and sometimes after a minute or so, suddenly the idle will pop back up to normal and the car will run perfect again with no explanation whatsoever. It seems to do all of this hot and cold. You can always keep it going by flooring it or giving it allot of gas. When you first start to give it the pedal, it sputters for a few seconds till the rpm's get up above 3500 or so, then it smooths right back out till the rpms drop below 1000 again.
Sorry for being so wordy but I wanted to get the point across as well as possible. The TPS went out a few moths ago and was changed. I didn't own the car then so i don't know what the symptoms were at the time. Does this sound like that could be the problem again? If anyone has any ideas, PLEASE LET ME KNOW. I am at my wits end at this point. Thank you very much....//p

[mustanghelper]

It could be alot of things. or it could be a intermittent electrical problem with the coil, or distributor. you may have a bad ground or somthing.

[coolwaterblvd]

Check your TPS sensor, and your MAF if equipped.

[venom800tt]

Yeah actually i had the same problem and still have it but not that bad. Sometimes the rpm drops but goes up suddenly, so its not that bad. Once i putted the car in neutral in downhill and while it was going down, it seems that engine shutt off, it was scary. Because its power brake and steering, so non of them worked properly. I was lucky no one was ahead of me. So i turned the ignition off and started the car while it was running. It was a bad experience, so i recommend you fix that thing. Sorry i dont know whats the problem. Just wanted to share a story and hope you all enjoyed.

[Oxford Mustang]

Hi there, I'm over here in the UK and I had the same problem with my 89 2.3 lx convertible. I had just changed the head gasket and had so many problems with bad idle, no acceleration, stalling and backfire in exhaust. I finally bit the bullet and got a 'real' mechanic to have a look, he checked the compression, over head cam timing etc. I had done all these things OK. BUT I had messed up the ignition timing by only 4 degrees. this caused all the problems you described. The timing was reset and hey presto all better. Check your distributor timing (or get a professional to do it, they know more about everything and sometimes it's worth paying for advice).