The fuel pressure reg seems more likely.
A spark plug, if only one, would just make it miss like a bucking bronco on three legs (it's a four cylinder. Three legs.. Sorry, bad yolk. ;-) If a general ignition problem such as bad coil or whatever that year Geo used (don't know if they were into the integrated electronica in 1992) you would think that it would also act up when it was cold, not exclusively when it was hot.
You really need someone to stick their head under the hood. But you knew that. My beam-me-up-Scottie-device hasn't worked for years, else I could just drop into your parking lot..
Yepper. I can’t pay a pro $50 for him to tell me what I suspect, my son lives in AR, and my son-in-law is on his way to Reno to get his son settled in for his first year of college. Both guys are mechanics, but they do me no good at this distance.
I just want to tell the mechanic what to look for, rather than saying, “It makes a funny noise when I try to start it and the little gizmo thingy is turning a funny color when it sticks to the whatchamacallit and then it starts to stink.”
And...it diesels when I shut it off, sometimes. Not always...but more than I want it to.
But the cost of the diagnostic was what I was most concerned with avoiding. That’s a waste of money, as far as I’m concerned. The next thing after the certainty of what’s wrong is to get the part. The Muffler Shop will go to Suzuki for it, and I don’t want to pay three times for something I can get after-market. Once I have the part, I only need to worry about the cost of labor.
So. Yes, I believe it is the fuel pressure regulator, but a couple of years ago, I was getting the raw gas smell like I’m getting now, and the engine would miss when I drove it, especially at high speeds. Come to find out, the idiot who installed the starter and replaced the distributor didn’t hook one of the wires up properly to the spark plug. Burned that wire a half-inch above the plug, and I had to get another distributor.
Stupid should hurt.