Hey guys <3 the site! I live on the island of Kauai and we have some great off road destinations. I will post pics soon. I've been having an erratic Check Engine Light and when driving up hill the engine will miss (lug) a little. Felt like bad spark plug wire so i tuned up but it's still there. Any ideas?
Thanks for having me!

Assuming by the user name, yours is a 3.0 V6? Did you get the wires back in proper order. It's easy to mix them up. If you take the cap off and look underneath, you'll see what I mean. It's routed weird in the cap, but it keeps the wires for each side of the motor neatly in order.

welcome to the wire.
mix in a full tune up, and do what hazy said.

New cap and wires are installed properly. Going to check vacuum lines today and see if somethings up. Thanks for the ideas. It really did feel like that miss you get when a plug wire is out. =\

Last time fuel filter was changed?

I assume you replaced the rotor along with the cap and wires.

Check the coil resistance. If it tests ok, there's still the chance that it's breaking down under load when hot.

Frank

Coil was my next idea. Thanks for all the help guys. I will keep you posted.

Check for dirty/poor connections to the pick up coil also.

I'd run a couple of cans of good injector cleaner thru it. Something like SeaFoam. If you are getting good spark and the air filter is clean and the fuel filter is new, I'd suspect a dirty injector. You need a richer fuel mix for power than you do for cruise. Normally, this means 12-13:1 when in heavy power mode (uphill pulls) vs. 14-16:1 at cruise on level ground. Higher speed also require more fuel. Since the injector only controls fuel quantity by varying the time of injection, a partially clogged injector will tend to lean out the engine enough to misfire, even with the computer trying to correct as it reads the lean condition from the ohtwo sensor. The ecu can't correct enough to overcome the effect of the clog, so the computer sets an error code and you see the cel. The light is intermittent because the problem "cures" itself when you aren't in a heavy pull because the computer resets the code after it can correct for a while.

pull the codes on it.


the early ECUs are pretty basic and a simple misfire wont cause the CEL to come on. if its coming on there is an electrical problem.


im speaking from experience. the fuel tank rusted out on 1 of my old VR4s. clogged the injectors pretty good. heavy misfire and no CEL.