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420A Car Completely, Randomly Dies 4 Month Problem

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mitecl96

10+ Year Contributor
460
9
Feb 20, 2012
McMinnville, Tennessee
96 Eclipse GS 420a Manual Trans.

About 4 months ago my car started to randomly die. I don't get a check engine light. It will die and I can wait for about 30 seconds and then it will fire back up. If I try to start right after it does, it will just crank over without firing up. I never had help, when it randomly die, to see if it was spark or fuel. I started to guess fuel pump so I went and replaced the pump, filter, and the pressure regulator. Car seemed to run better but then it died again a week later. I checked and wiggled all the connectors under the hood with the engine on and tried to get it to died again, but came up with nothing. It finally died to where I had a friend with me and came up with it is losing spark. So I checked all the wires and everything was getting the right volts. I then ended up replacing the coil pack, plug wires, plugs, cam sensor, and crank sensor. After all that it still ended up too randomly die. Got another ecm and the car ran better than it ever did and I was sure that it was fixed, but only to find out the next day it randomly died again.

Now I am completely lost at what it can be. I have no CEL on. The car will run great and shows no signs when it dies. It dies completely random. I can go weeks without it dying. Weather I am driving down a high way, slowing down to stop, or stopped doesn't matter. Also, doesn't matter if its raining, sun shinning, hot, or cold outside. Sometimes it will die and I will sit there for a minute and it will start back up and not give me any trouble for a few days and other times I will sit for a minute and it will fire back up but die again after about 5 minutes driving. I have taken it to 4 shops to try and hook up a scanner to read sensors and try to pin point the problem but no ones scanners can communicate with my ecm being the 96 model.

Also battery recently died on my at the beginning of this month and was replaced with a bigger battery a step down from a yellow top batter. Right now I have put $300 in everything I have replaced and I hate throwing money at this car because I am trying to save to get another car. Please help and thanks for your time.
 
Crank position sensor

Edit: I see you replaced that. I would start looking at your pcm grounds and connections. Might have some bad or corroded grounds.

The wires going to the crank sensor may also be damaged somewhere.

This sounds exactly like my freinds 98 gs when the ckp went out. Work for a while, die, no instant restart, wait for 5-10 min, work good for a short while, die again.
 
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