Okay, let me explain everything from start to finish. I bought this 97' SS Camaro with 68,000 miles on it a few weeks ago. The owner had spun a bearing in the supercharger that was on it and had a mechanic remove the supercharger and plug everything up involving it. When I first test drove the car it ran fine with no major problems that I could see. After I took it home and drove it more it would occasionally start bucking, backfiring through the exhaust and the tachometer would be jumping all over the place but the engine speed seemed to be consistent. I started investigating and heard how bad the Opti-spark systems were on this car so I looked at the opti and found that the wiring harness plugging into the opitspark had no green sealing ring to protect it from moisture and the clip was broken off were it actually plugs into the optispark. When I removed the connector I saw that it was covered in a a rust like colored fluid. I purchased a new wiring harness for the optispark and thoroughly cleaned the connector on the optispark where it connects. I thought this had fixed it as the car ran great for roughly a week. During this time I ordered new bearings for the Procharger and rebuilt and re-installed it onto the car. Now during this entire time before and after re-installing the procharger the car has had HORRIBLE gas mileage (180miles per tank). So the procharger was re-installed...the car ran great for about a week and then one day sitting at a stop light I looked down at the tach and it was jumping all over the place but the car was remaining consistent at idle. After I took off a few minutes later the car started backfiring and missing and had no power at all to where I couldn't go over 40mph. The car eventually died. When I tried to restart it I took a good 20 seconds of cranking before it fired. Now it ocassionally will do this starting issue but still run fine. Today it ran fine but on my way home it started missing and backfiring again to where it couldn't pull itself up a hill. I pulled over for a minute and let off the gas. The car returned to an idle for a minute and then I was able to pull away as if nothing had even happened and the car had full power again. Now, one of my friends who is a mechanic said there are several possibilties with it and that it may be the optispark where the moisture is inside it but I thought the optispark on the 97 models were sealed and only had a vacuam line??? He also said depending on how camaro's are wired it could be a bad crank position sensor that is causing the tach to jump all over the place and because of that faulty signal the computer is trying to adjust the timing to compensate and that's causing the backfiring and missing.

So i guess my main question is...where the does the tach pickup signal from? From the crank position sensor or from the optispark? I think if I can isolate that issue it'll fix all of the above problems because they all seem to happen when the tach starts to jump around including it not starting till you crank it for 20-30 seconds.

Any thoughts or advice from the experts is diffenetly apprecieated.


OH...fyi...the service light is on and the codes being displayed are P0400 for EGR recirculation and also another code for inefficient catalytic converter on the right bank.