Please need help with my explorer

[counterstrike52]

ok i have a 4 door 1991 ford explorer, i went to clean the air filter and i got all the dust out of it i put everything back and now the truck stalls from time to time and has trouble starting. What could be wrong??

[DodgeChick]

Are you sure you put the air filter back in correctly? It could be causing a malfuction.

Howcome you didnt just replace the air filter instead of cleaning it? Wouldnt that have been easier?

[wildman89]

agreed^as above

[CARL]

Hay counterstrike I had the same problem. try cleaning the air flow sensor located on top of the air cleaner box. spray with carb cleaner. let dry. should work.

[Ford4x4Chik27]

You can take yer air filter OUT and it wouldn't matter. I'm with CARL on this one... maybe yer Mass Air Flow Sensor is clogged or malfunctioning

good luck!!!

[chevyguy]

Check all the hoses from the air box and make sure you got all of them reconnected, this is a known killer,

[Itstali25]

check the wire going to your MAF, make sure its plugged in real good, might help

[Ford4x4Chik27]

Well?????? How's it comin?

[superluber]

Counterstrike52,
FYI. Last May, after a dozen years and 120,000+ miles, we finally traded our 1991 Explorer in for a 2001 Expy. The old Explorer was starting to do too well at living up to one of the more crass nicknames (Exploder). It did pretty well for most of the 12 years or so we owned it, but it could not handle our new pop-up camper in the mountains of AZ. (We sure as heck could never rely on it for going to the big mts. of CO or UT.) But I spent more than a year trying to diagnose a problem that might be related to yours. At first it was pretty much intermittent, but then got pretty bad.

If cleaning the MAF and checking the electrical connection to it hasn't
helped, you might check the throttle body. Afer several independent techs looked it over, and 2 trips to the dealer service dept., we finally found that both the throttle body air horn and the butterfly plate were badly worn. (OK, so butterfly mat not be the correct name, but it looks like the butterfly in the old carburetor chokes.) What I am calling the air horn is the most forward part of the throttle body where the rubber hose air intake from the air filter housing clamps on.
What we finally found was the both the t-body and the "butterfly" were so badly worn on one side that too much air was going past when closed, and when releasing the throttle to idle down, it would stick. The "butterfly" had actually rubbed away part of the t-body housing, so that there was a ridge that would sometimes cause it to not be able to swing all the way closed. The inside of the t-body at that point looked something like the inside of an engine cylinder where the piston rings would wear the cylinder wall only up to a certain point at the top of its travel.
Because of the spring loading of the moving parts in the t-body, the wear was all on the passenger side of the t-body. Even if this is not the cause of your trouble, you may want to keep an eye on it.
I know this was kind of a long reply, but I thought a more complete reply here might reduce the back and forth stuff that we see sometimes.
Good luck, and let us know how it turns out.