Difficulty Starting Up

[himself]

I replaced my air flow meter with a MegaSquirt system last year and the car ran great but within the last 3 months the car takes anywhere from a couple minutes to 10 minutes to start. It will just sit there and crank over and over and then hesitate briefly and fire up at random. ( It also tries to crank backwards every now and then while starting normally but it's ben doing that since I installed the MS system last year.)

Checked the fuel, got pressure, I can hear the the pump turn on and stay on, checked and cleaned all the sparkplugs, checked the distributor cap for moisture, checked for spark and it all was good. Checked and cleaned all my grounds as well.

21 month old battery, year old MSI coil, brand new spark plug wires, all new spark plugs.

 

I've noticed that the time it takes to start depends on the time its been sitting since its last startup; overnight startups take a long time compared to just sitting for a couple hours when it may only take 30 seconds or so.

[Matt Cramer]

I'd see if the cranking pulse width settings are off. Also check your timing to be sure it hasn't moved somehow, as this can often cause the kick-back sort of problems.

[himself]

Played with the cranking pulse width settings to no avail. Then I noticed a trend with the fusable links. One was ok looking the other was pretty corroded so I pulled both of them and replaced them. Starts up on the first try now which is much better but I still get kickbacks from the starter.

Wouldn't the car run terribly if the timing was off? It runs quite well but starts pretty badly (at least on the first try though now).

[mobythevan]

under spark settings, what do you have for "cranking timing" and "hold ignition"? Please post your msq file.