weird starting problems on '86 LX

[Asha'man]

Okay, I was helping my buddy with his '86 LX hatch tonight and we hit a couple of problems. The main thing is that the power for the car cuts in and out when a harness is moved. It's the harness that goes to the ground point on the driver's inner fender, I think. Once we got that sorta stabilized, we fired it up and got a major coolant leak from the TB gasket. Bypassed that crap and now it seems to be running okay, or at least it was for the 3 minutes we had it running before the neighbor lady came down and yelled at us. Combo is:

forged DSS 306
lightly ported E7 heads
unknown small cam
Edelbrock Performer intake
BBK shorties
2-chamber Flowmaster exhaust, no cats (it's freakin' LOUD)
mass air conversion
Moroso CAI

Anyone got any suggestions for the power cutoff problem?

Ash

 

[zeusmoto]

well was the power cut off or did it kind of sputter out i have the same car and have had similar things happen. but it was because i washed my enginge bay and water vapor got trapped under the distributor. well does it run fine now? and what part of the harness was giving you the trouble?

 

[Asha'man]

Okay, sorry for no info in the first post - it was about 0230 and I was hella tired.

The harness runs along the driver's inner fender. Not attached, just parallel. What it was doing was giving power or not depending on the position of that harness. We looked for broken wires or loose connections, but didn't find anything. Both of the fusible links were intact as well. Eventually I guess we found a happy medium, because the car was consistently getting power for a while, but I don't know if we addressed the problem. If I go over again today I'll take a picture.

Ash

 

[zeusmoto]

alright get the picture and post it i am pretty sure i can figure it out

 

[Asha'man]

It's runnin' good now, who knows what the problem was. Thanks for the help, though.

Ash