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crap, spark plug change gone BAD...

733 views 2 replies 2 participants last post by  SlickBullet 
#1 ·
seriously, how hard is it to change plugs, wires, cap and rotor, right?? well plugs were the easy part. did them and the wires one at a time. couple of the wires were just a touch short so i ended up using one of teh old set. probably didn't need to swap the wires as these didn't look bad at all...

ran it a bit and while it still ran decently it was a little rougher than with the old plugs. I checked and found that one of my wires wasn't clipping onto the cap fully so i put another old wire back on and that issue went away, but it still ran just a tad rough. also at this point my idle was off... when I picked up the car it idled at about 800 neutral and 700 in gear. now its about 600 neutral and 450-500 in gear. sometime it sounds like its gonna die... plus when i run on the highway for a bit, once I stop and put it in park it will idle at 1500 for about 30 seconds, then drop back down to 600 or so...

Hmm, not working right, so lets throw more parts at it, right? I had noticed that two of the caps terminals had a bit of corrosion on them, so I went to get a new cap and rotor. turns out there are two types of rotors, push on and bolt on... no clue what I needed, so i go back home to pull off the cap. I find that one of the bolts are stuck pretty good, and that the screwdriver is NOT gonna get it out. so I get a 1/4 drive socket and proceed to twist the bolt in half, with most of it still in my distributor... Crap.... pull out the dizzy (or rather unbolt the AC compressor so I can get at the Dizzy hold down bolt) but before I do that i make a mark on the dizzy shaft and a convinant rad hose so i can put it back in the same way I took it out... yep, that was stupid...

take the dizzy into my back yard so i can drill out the broken bolt, and my drill wanders off center so i end up with a new hole going through mostly the bolt, and a little of the dizzy... crap.. luckily I have a random assortment of nuts and bolts from HID projector conversions so I was able to put it bac together with the off center hole..; did I mention that no one around me has the dizzy for my car, but they can all order it and have it here in two days? yay... i made mine work. I thought...

get everything bolted in and put back where it was to start with, adn test fire my car... starts right up, but still had that damn stumble/low idle... let it idle a bit, but didn't take it anywhere. still running like it did after the plug swap.

So then tonight at 8:45 i load all my stuff for work in the car and head out. (Any one notice something that i missed doing considering I had the Dizzy OUT of the car??) as soon as I hit the On ramp and pick up speed it bucks bad. I take my foot off the pedal and slow down and the engine smooths out... so i keep going. I get 8 miles down the interstate and it starts bucking and I have no power... pedal to the floor and its slowing down... I pull off to the side and it dies. will fire up, but runs real rough and wont idle...

I'm thinking that maybe I should have checked the timing before I took it out on the road... i couldn't hear any detonation or pinging, but then its a convertible with bad weather seals and I couldn't even hear the engine running...

so lets say my timing was off... how badly could i have messed it up? ideas as to what I should check when I get back to it in the morning? Funny thing is, I bought this car to drive until I can get a new motor for my 02GT.... now its broked as well.... im going back to a horse and buggy I think..
 
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#2 ·
pulled the plugs that I had put in, and they were gapped at .025 - .03. Factory spec is .054... One was so close, it wasnt touching, but I coudnt fit the gapper tool in it... Put the old plugs back in that were gapped at a good solid .05 - .052 and all is right in the world. also my timing was off... when I hooked up the light the mark on the ballancer was about 1/4 - 1/2 inch further clockwise. no clue if that was advanced or retarded, but it sure showed that I was being retarded when I started working on this car...
 
#3 ·
not retared, just in a rush, I work in auto motive, and I diag vehicles all the time with misfires and rough running, You can never visually tell if spark plug wires are good or bad just by looking at them, a 50/50 water/alcohol mix in a spray bottle works well, just spray all the ignition parts and 9/10 you can find a nice arc flying to a ground, and always check gap on plugs especialy when new, unless you're running a newer model with Iridium, can damage the electode if you check them...
 
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