Hard to start / stumble after A/C kicks in

forever3

Registered User
Here's a head scratcher... engine turns over fine, it just turns over 5 or 6 times before it fires. After it does it seems to run okay unless the a/c kicks in right away, then it stumbles, somtimes stalls the engine. No codes, and it runs fine other than that. Any ideas?
 
check your battery. your car starts off the battery, it may not be holding a high enough charge tos tart the car the first crank, andasfor the a/c, the car runs on the alternator when the car is on, but it still goes through the battery, so if your battery is bad, the extra load of the ac on your accesories could cause it to die
 
It has an original style Motorcraft battery in it. Though not original, probably is a good place to start. What kind of cca's should it be getting? Would a higher amp battery be the way to go, or a waste of money?

It is a 1990 3.8 sc automatic (wife's car). garage kept since new with 50k miles on it. he only thing that kept me from jumping to a new battery was the low, and sometimes rough idle. Probably a seperate problem?
 
Did the tune-up a couple of months ago. The car is the wife's car and she works at the local ford dealership. She told them to throw all the parts at it they could, but they only did the plug wires since the platinum plugs were still as good as new. I don't know if they did the fuel filter or not, but I put one on it about a year ago. I'm kinda wondering if the IAC could be acting up? As far as I can tell, it hasn't been changed. Up until I did the tune-up, it even had the factory plug wires on it, so I kinda doubt it. Acording to the rap sheet the dealer has on it, all it has had is a battery, tires and oil changes since the day it was new. One nice thing about this car is that it was a local one-owner that was bought new from the dealership she works at, and the owner was very insistent that they were the ONLY ones to pop the hood on it... even for oil changes and tire rotations, so all of it's service history is on file.
 
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