Question About '87 Dakota

The vehicle is an '87 Dakota 3.9L Automatic with 83,000 original miles. On the way back from a 20 mile round trip, the truck starts misfiring, bucking, and diesiling while still running, then finally stalls. I crank it over and finally starts when I push the pedal to the floor. It runs but real crappy for 30 seconds and stalls again. I pop the hood, check wiring, carb, choke etc. and all looks good. No smell of excess fuel. I wait a few minutes and it starts right up and runs perfectly. I drive another 5 miles, let it idle, start and stop it a few times and it runs perfectly again. If it did it once, its bound to do it again far away from home. Any ideas? I'm thinking of swapping a spare computer into it. Any other ideas or known issues to look at first? Tough to diagnose while running perfectly.

Tank of crappy gas? What would make you think of the computer being bad first thing. Most of the time that isn't the problem. I had trouble with the distributor pickup on mine.

Think I would look at the wiring to be sure you don't have wires that are corroded. There was an issue with Dakotas from the early 90s around the brake booster area where wires broke off a bundle. Or it could be time for a new fuel filter.

The biggest issue I ever had from my carbed 3.9 was the feedback carb, and a bad fuel filter. I replaced the filter, found a different carb to replace the original (that had been rebuilt several times), and the problem went away. Gene

IIRC some had a dist gear problem.Seems the gears would wear out.Cam gear was still good but the dist gear wore.Had a few at work years ago.The first one gave us fits.Then I talked to my friend at the dealer and he told me about the gear.Rocky

Thanks for the ideas. The fuel filter and carburetor were changed about two years ago which is less than 10,000 miles ago. I'll pull the distributor and if the gear looks ok, I'll swap out the pick up coil since it's relatively inexpensive and a known issue on some of that vintage.

The dist pickup and crank pos sensor are both known to crap out when hot....But yours started when hot....probably not them.

Like Rick said, I have one that acted like that too .
Was the distributor pick up , it didn't take long for it to cool and started right back up again. .


Jim F

I had an '86 that would just die. Had a broken soldwe joint in the computer. when it runs bad try shaking the wires/connector into the computer. If that clears up the problem then the computer is the culprit. Component failure is actually pretty rare but solder joints do fail.