HELP, Drove through huge puddle, cars running funny??!?

silverstangman

New Member
Mar 26, 2003
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Eastern NC
Sorry its so long, but please read guys.

So last Friday i decided to drive the 95 to work to basically show off to this new guy we have out there. So I decided to get some breakfast from McDonalds before I headed into work. Well right before you get into Mcdonalds there is this pretty severe curve that you really can't see around too well. So i'm doing about 50 around the curve when I see the pond of water about a foot deep standing in the road in front of me, I look over my shoulder and see a car in the left lane so I can't get over and I have no time to slow down. I hit the puddle, with about 2/3 of the passenger side and about 1/3 of the driver side in the dry lane on the left. It slowed me down from like 45 to 10 mph in like 1 second, it was insane. Immediately afterwards I could tell it wasn't running right, felt like it was lacking power and when i revved it to like 2,000 it really didn't sound right. Anyway, so I figured you know let it dry out and hopefully it will run right again, well I drove it again today and it feels the same. Feels like it doesn't have the same get up and go, and it doesn't sound quite right when i rev it? I figured i might have gotten water into my engine? Or is there anything else I could have done? And if so what do i need to check? Could i have gotten water on the plugs? would this cause the syptoms I described? Please help guys, this just made my whole day miserable.

Thanks,
Eric
 
this exact thing happened to me. What happened was it turned out that my cap was cracked and water had gotten in there, shorting out the electrodes. Open your dizzy cap and if you see any water in there at all then take a hair dryer to it for a solid 20 minutes and try again. That worked for me.
 
yes I was referring to the distributor cap. Its a gray cap that your spark plugs and coil connect to. It is in the front of the engine attached to the rotor. The distributor is responsible for distributing spark from your voltage coil to the correct spark plug. If water gets into the distributor cap, it can short out the connections between the coil and the sparkplug electrodes, thus causing all sorts of bizarre firings. Here's a how stuff works link which gives a better description then I.

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/ignition-system4.htm

good luck!

- adam