Frankenfestiva needs help!

[ajb]

Hey everyone this is my first time posting on the site so my dear ratty 89 festiva lx has taken a turn for the worse, at first it suffered lack of power uphill and now it wont even shift past first gear or exceed 20 miles an hour the cat is clear and i replaced the fuel filter about 20000 miles ago can anyone think of a good starting point for troubleshooting? Thanks for any input and i'm in statesville north carolina if anyone in the area has time to come look , thanks Rustyroots photo 1.jpgphoto 2.jpgphoto 3.jpg

[tooldude]

Make sure the intake and air filter have not become restricted also. If good, then check compression. What is the mileage?

[M3NTAL]

Your in luck, NC has a bunch of festiva owners, Im sure someone is around your area that could help you out.

[Movin]

Is it missing or just real doggy ?

[Stinsin63]

I always start with the basics, in this case I would check the air filter, plugs, plug wires, cap & rotor. If this all happened at once after a fill up maybe you got some bad gas?

[ajb]

its been slowly declining in health and just recently started to not shift until i let off the the accelerator i have replaced the spark plugs cap and rotor, im fearing that it might be the torque converter. the car has 120,000 miles but movin i think its just really doggy. i guess plug wires are overdue replacement but i did clean them with some rubbing alchohol and a qtip. what would be my best method to check restriction on the intake?

[Movin]

You probably already checked the timing belt marks, but some of these start wearing the keyway for the lower sprocket and make the timing go retarded but actually look dead on.

To check that you have to pull #1 plug. Put the cam timing mark dead on. Rock the crank back and forth and feel the piston with a wire. You will feel it start to go down at both ends of your rocking. Do this enough to be confident about stopping dead center between the piston movements. This will be very close to the real TDC. Look at your cam timing mark and see if it is still aligned.

In the shop atmoshere we have accurate ways of checking this but you can do the above as an indicator to see if the crank - lower pulley timing needs more investigation.

Disty timing was checked with tune parts ?

The type of power loss you describe is either flow related : Flow of air in, flow of exhaust out, flow of fuel ..many possible causes but they can be quickly narrowed down to you problem if it is flow related. The other possible is timing related, ignition timing (disty), cam timing (timing belt ), valve timing ( flat cam or bad key way ), crank timing (described above )

lol, it has wheels it can be something out of the ordinary!!

[ajb]

Awesome movin ill let you know what i find. Thanks for the help!