1994 Suburban Intermittent Electrial Failure

[FALCON2]

1994 C1500 5.7 Suburban automatic. Problem is intermittent and occurs occassionally while driving under normal conditions. What happens is that the ignition system will completey cut out. When this occurs the instrument panel guages (Oil & Temp) freeze at whatever condition the engine was operating at, and the Volt meter drops to zero. I may even recall the speedometer freezing in place. When attempting to restart, the engine will turn over. but the first attempts to restart usually fail due to no spark. One thing to note is that the guages will not reset (oil press to 0 and temp to current engine temp) and the voltmeter still registers 0 volts when the ignition key is turned to on. The first indication I get that the the engine will restart is that the guages all reset when I turn the key on. When this first started the engine would usually restart afeter several attempts, now the time between the failure and a successfull restart could take more then a day. The other thing to note is that, in most cases when I finally get the engine to start, as soon as the transmission is taken out of PARK and placed into gear the fault immediately occurs along with the gauges freezing again, and then I have to sit and wait from anywhere of up to a couple of minutes to hours before it may start again.

The truck has a new ignition system including distrubutor and new coil, and a new ignition switch all of which had no effect on the problem. I swapped the ECM with the ECM from my 94 Silvarado and it functions correctly.