esandes

my es250 has suddenly decided to stall on me after i drove it hard on the highway to help to clean out the soot from the fuel system.

the engine has always run rich. i can smell it from the engine bay and the exhaust.

i guess it floods on start-up and stalls so after i start her i let it idle at a decent RPM until the temp comes to normal, then it doesn't stall. i have noticed a significant loss of power too.

this car is rigged as per california emissions. can i bypass the secondary o2 sensor? what should i do to help the performance? i think the 1st thing to do is to get a new fuel filter?

Lexmex

I would use some Techron first, however there might be a lot of crud over the years in the bottom of your tank. It didn't take long for my RX300 in Mexico to get that crud given the gas here.

To bypass that secondary O2 sensor (not that it might solve your problem), but could kill the CEL problem, is to get an O2 eliminator. Offhand, I am thinking Underdog Racing Development may have an eliminator that could do it, but others might suggest something here.

The fuel filter can be an issue, but I don't know the ES250 enough to know if it has the nylon sock type filter inside the tank or not.

esandes

turns out that one of the gears on one of the camshafts was partially broken off. so the whole timing system was messed up with a bad woodruff key too. they thought the timing belt was missing some teeth too.