CEL light burned out?

[steppjohn]

Hi,

I just had my 95 LeSabre looked at for the mysterious "occasional engine shut down problem." that has been talked of a few times here.

I was thinking maybe I would get the Crank Sensor changed since that seemed to be a possible problem item.?.

I had no CEL light suggesting anything (I thought)

But guess what, The mechanic pulled codes and found a code for the TPS. He said the TPS was not sending out a signal at all. Did not know I had a TPS problem. The car seemed to drive and perform fine, except for the occasional intermittant engine shut down. Is this likely for a TPS to fail and not be noticed?
.
I had him change the TPS and I looked more closely at my test lights that glow on start up. Guess what, The CEL light did not light up!! I have no idea how long it might have been "out."

So I gotta fix that.

Any advice from you guys? I have in the past taken off the top of the dash that accesses the area where the warning lights are, but I never did anything to the lights and I don't recall what they even look like.

Thought I would ask before I get into this, Is it easy?, do you just change a bulb?, or is it a more difficult thing to do?

John

 

[steppjohn]

Hello /.Found the burned out Check Engine Light...and more ...
Thought I would give a reply to this since I started this, and this became very interesting.

First...The mechanic changed the Throttle Position Sensor (TPS). It was dead and since the CEL light was also dead I did not know of the TPS problem, but car had seemed to run OK.
But the car had the problem of randomly cutting off, just like the key was turned off. Always restarted. Annoying and dangerous..
Well.... since I have the new working TPS, the stalling has not re-occurred. Been some 250 miles or more. Very good, but I can't really say that it is fixed since I really never knew what the real cause was, but it looks good!!.

The other thing that adds interest here related to the cruise control. My cruise had never worked in the 3 years I have had the car. When I was changing the burned out CEL light I decided to check all the other lights also to see if any others needed changing. When I got to the Cruise, it lit up!!
And on an operational check drive, the cruise worked!!!

I think that the cruise does not work if it does not get a good signal from the TPS. My new TPS fixed it!!! I think!

So the new TPS fixed the stalling out and the cruise problems.

I have some questions on the various warning lights, but will address that later..

John

 

[journeyforce]

Thats great to hear. Did you ever get the crank sensor replaced? If not you should still think about having it replaced as it is a known weak point that will give you trouble down the line. When I bought my 2005 LeSabre, that was the first thing I did the first weekend I owned the car. The crank sensor was not bad nor was it giving me issues but having worked on enough 3800 engines, I know that that would leave me high and dry at an unexpected time so I changed it out as preventive maintenance

Good luck with your car

 

[steppjohn]

Still no engine cut off's!! I remain excited....
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No, I did not do anything to the crank sensor, not yet anyway. Are there any symptons that I should be looking for as a warning about this??
The car has 138000 miles. I only added 7000 or so of these, and do not know if it ever been changed before.
As I said, it seems to be running good...

John

 

[MrMarty51]

If You are changing out known good parts with new parts then put the known good parts in the box that the new part was in,mark it with a sharpie what it is and then put it in a box with anyother parts You have replaced,put them n the trunk along with the tools required to change them out,just in case the new part would happen to fail out in the middle of nowhere.just sayin.thats all.