Hi devilspns:
First off I'm sorry to hear about your health which I'm sure you know at your age is number one! So please do all you can do on that front to never give up and never surrender as Winston Churchill once said during WWII. I'm a young one at 72 and quite fortunate as far as my health goes and I'm recently only fighting the battle of the bulge with my waist line as I recently quit smoking 8 months ago and I'm quite lucky that I have no C.O.P.D. after smoking for some 42 years. I only started in my thirties and didn't start when I was young. As far as automobiles go I started working on cars when I was fifteen. Since I'm an 'Army Brat' lol; my Father had bought a 3.4 liter Jaguar Sedan while we lived in Yokohama Japan. And during a tour of duty in Alaska his Jaguar would no longer charge the battery. He told me if I could fix it, he would give the car to me to drive to High School in it. Since we lived on Fort Richardson next to Elmendorf Air Force base I took his car to a bay where I could check out some tools and found the generator had thrown some solder where a wire had come loose from the commutator. Once soldered back the generator started to function again. I got lucky and due to that luck liked working on cars. I later at seventeen worked at a place called Gupton's Sinclair (a gas station) where I rebuilt motors and learned a lot about repairing cars. Due to that Jaguar I started my passion for English cars.
I have owned a 1967 Triumph GT6, a 1971 Jaguar XKE Roadster, and now my 2003 Aston Martin DB7 Vantage Volante manual stick shift. After buying the DB7VV it had the nasty habit of throwing up 'CEL' lights, where I did everything I could to resolve that issue. During the first several years of ownership all I ever did was 'Drive Cycles' only to have another 'CEL' light come back on, it was maddening! As luck would have it I repaired just about everything such as installing new Air Filters, cleaning the MAF sensors, replacing the the fuel filters, and fuel pumps and removed the intake manifolds to make sure I had the second generation coils, upgraded the spark plugs to the Iridium plugs, and sent the fuel injectors out for a professional cleaning. I tested the fuel rails to make sure they had the right amount of fuel pressure as well. I also replaced all the O2 Lambda sensors as well, and after all that I still had the 'CEL' light issue. That's when I finally did a in line Vacuum test I found the vacuum leaks at the PCV valves, and that finally resolved the issue, but only after checking the CPU's as well! What was happening is due to the additional oxygen entering the system thru the leaks the car's CPU's would try to compensate by richening the fuel mixture where it was never able overcome the lean mixture caused by the vacuum systems leaks.
Since I live in SoCal in order to pass the SMOG tests all the vehicle's computers had to show an OK with an OBDII scanner. Without that I could not get the car registered to get a sticker for my license plate to drive the vehicle. I did the 'Drive Cycle' as outlined in the OBDII manual so many times I became a professional at doing it where I can now do a 'Drive Cycle' on a single run and get all the computers to show OK on a single run!
I'm also a member of the AMOC Forum where I got a lot of help and advice to fix all the issues I've outlined above. In particular on that forum there's a guy named William Temple who is a walking encyclopedia when it comes to the DB7. I also joined the Aston Martin Technical website for a period of 24 hours where I was able to download all the technical documents about my vehicle.
Here's a picture of my DB7 above. If I can be of any technical assistance please just ask.
Best Regards,
John F Edwards aka johnfe
