last night i replaced my thermostat. car ran beautiful on the test spin. no more “red zone trips” with the temp needle. then my teg sat for about 2 hours. i got in the car to go home and the tach needle started going crazy. it would jump real fast from like 500 rpm to 4,000 rpm and then it sat at 0 rpm like it was’nt working. then the car died. it started back up and i drove it, but the engine kept bogging like it was cutting out. the car died on me 3 times before i could get to 711(this was a 5 mile trip). when i got it to 711, it smelt like something electrical was frying. before i replaced the thermo, everything was fine except the “overheating thing”. i checked over everything i was working on and found that the screw for the ground wire on the thermo housing was loose. i had no tools on me so i tried tightening it with a pair of plyers in 711. << we could’nt find the original screw for this when we put it back together, so we used one we thought had the same thread pattern.>> i drove it home with it still doin the same sh*t. i got a screwdriver from home and tried to tighten it but it kept on spinning. i spoke with my friend that helped me and he found the original screw. i’m gonna put the correct screw on there.
---- COULD A LOOSE GROUND WIRE FROM THE THERMOSTAT HOUSING CAUSE THIS PROBLEM OR IS IT COINCIDENTALLY SOMETHING ELSE???
problem solved… it was the ground wire.
sounds like the distributor. check the ignition coil and igniter connection. the shop replaced my whole distributor cuz they dont sell the igniter separately. after that was put in, it died as well. it turned out to be a faulty power relay or soemthing. its the one under the driver side dash, next to the main fuel relay. after that was fixed the 3rd distributor finally fixed everything- the bouncing tach and shutdowns. rebuilt distro w/o coil should cost 200-230.
not every problem starts the same way as yours did XDEep! its not always the distributor! it the ground plain and simple!