Random shutoff

[@TDC]

Hey guys. I'm in the middle of diagnosing a problem I'm having with my car. It started happening a couple weeks ago. I am having a hard time pin pointing the problem. Basically whenever I am driving this is happening. If I drive my car for an extended period of time lets say 25-60 minutes in the city it will get to the point where it will randomly shut off when I take it out of gear. There will be times when I have to hold the rpm's at 1500-2000 just to keep the car from shutting off. It happens usually when the car is warmed up and driving for a while. Sometimes when I take it out of gear the rpm's will drop to the point of almost shutting the car off but then it will barely keep itself alive. If I keep driving it then it will just shut off when I let off of the throttle. If it dies I have to let it sit for about 5 minutes before I can start it up again. Then it happens all over again. I am tuned running speed density and E85. I was only tuned for WOT in higher temperatures around 95-108 degrees. Now the winter is setting in and that's when the problem really started happening. Its a lot colder now and I am not sure if that has anything to do with the problem. This was not a problem during the summer when the weather was hotter. For a second I thought it would be something electrical. So while the car was on I took off the negative battery terminal off to test the alternator and the car stayed on. I do have the battery relocated to the back using one 0 gauge wire with an inline fuse routed to the engine bay. The alternator does not have its own designated line to the battery. The alt wire just goes into a distribution block. The reason I am posting this thread is to get some comments on what and how I can test different parts that can be the cause of this problem. So far I have just done the battery test and also a boost leak test. I have no substantial boost leaks and the alternator did not give out while removing the negative terminal from the battery. Another piece of information that may help is while cold starting my car it takes a solid 10 attempts of turning over the motor before I can get it started. Thanks for any help. Its greatly appreciated.

 

[MQTalon92]

Check your ECU. Its not a good thing to test the alternator by unpluging the battery with the engine running. Many people have fried their ECU that way. E85 does have tricky tuning issues when it gets cold. Try messing with fuel and timing settings at idle and low rpm. Also check the fuel tank pickup sock (screen) it sometimes gets pluged when using E85 from different stations. I've had some issues when getting fuel from off-brand stations. Does it have this problem when using 93 octane. You may want to switch until it gets warmer out.

 

[Marchev]

X2 on checking the ecu. Sounds very much like leaking caps

 

[@TDC]

Check your ECU. Its not a good thing to test the alternator by unpluging the battery with the engine running. Many people have fried their ECU that way. E85 does have tricky tuning issues when it gets cold. Try messing with fuel and timing settings at idle and low rpm. Also check the fuel tank pickup sock (screen) it sometimes gets pluged when using E85 from different stations. I've had some issues when getting fuel from off-brand stations. Does it have this problem when using 93 octane. You may want to switch until it gets warmer out.

I doubt it's leaking caps but I'll definitely check it out. My caps were replaced by ecmtuning when I had my ecu socketed. That was about 6 months ago. I also have not went to any other e85 station since I converted to e85. We only have one local station.

X2 on checking the ecu. Sounds very much like leaking caps

I will double check!