#3 MissFire, sucking gass, Please Help !

[skinnadoor]

Hey everyone !

I'm new to the forum and this is my first post, so here goes.

Our family car is the 2001 Camery, 4Cyl, Manual. On the way home the engine started running rough, and the check engine light started flashing, and there was noticably less power and seems to be sucking a lot of fuel, idle remains constant at 750rpm.

After a quick stop at a friends place, we hooked up the code checker and first off, was "#3 Cyl Missfire" and second was an EGR Fault code. I quickly replaced the plugs, and after no change, meterd all for wires and all 4 wires were well within limits. Damn.. So next we thought we would meter the 1 of 2 iginition coil packs, the coil that feeds numer 3, the missfiring cyl. This is where things get sketchy because i'm not sure if we metered the igtion coil correctly. We removed the coil pack completly, and you can see there are 4 prongs on it, which one is ground? Who knows, but we put the black lead of the meter on the far left prong and started touching the red lead to the other 3 prongs.... my manual says resitance for the coil pack shuld be .9 to 1.05 Ohms and after trying every which way of metering it, 69 ohms came up on 2 of the contacts and 5 M-ohmes came up on the remaing 2 ???? Does this sound right to you guys? Am i metering it propperly? And most importantly, Would a bad coil pack only cause just the #3 Cyl to missfire ???

This is all the info i can think of aside from the main serp alt drive belt bein loose, which i didn't think would affect this.


Thanks everyone.

[hzt30]

Try pulling the wire off the #3 spark plug and using a spark tester see if there is any spark while cranking or running. If no spark tester, plug one of the old plugs in the boot of the spark plug wire, ground the plug and check for spark at the plug. If no spark, then coil is suspect.

[JohnGD]

If the coil is bad then cylinder #2, which is paired to #3 in the waste spark system should have some problems too? Try swapping coils with #1/#4 (or just move ALL the wires over as the thread below suggested). You may want to do a compression test too on #3.

I remember seeing something about testing the primary, but can't find it now. This thread below is testing secondary windings among other things:
How to test the ignition coils on 98 camry I4?

[coffee-3000]

I've had misfires a few times over the last year and even though the same coil pack is used for two cylinders, the code only displayed for one.
On the first misfire, a new coil pack was required.
On the second misfire, a local repair shop somehow clean the fuel injector with carb cleaner.
On the third misfire, I replaced a fuel injector myself.
This was the only misfire where the CEL light would blink.

To determine if it is the coil pack or the fuel injector,
you have to switch the location of two coil packs.
If the misfire remains on the cylinder that first showed the misfire,
then it points to the fuel injector in that cylinder. If it moves to a different cylinder,
then it is following the location of the bad coil pack.

I hope this helps.

[skinnadoor]

Hey Gang !!! Got her going.

The Fix? Well first off i took #3 spark plug wire off and pluged and old plug on it and with the car running, tried to ground the end of the plug and see if there was a spark..... and bang... the spark was arching out of the plug wire, about 3/4 up the rubber insulation. This caused the miss fire, and new spark plug wires fixed it. Now, the second issue, hi fuel consumption and erratic idle. The EGR Valve was stuck. I pulled the rubber hoses off and removed the EGR valve. The two ports on the EGR valve were clogged like bad arteries.... a metal pic and compress air, widend up the ports, and i cleaned all i could with a wire brush, gently, and more compressed air. the end result, killer fuel economy again in the camery, smooth idle and killer accelleration.

Thanks to all. The wires were $75 but the EGR valve was $450new, worth cleaning to save the money. Hell, if you have problems with high fuel consumption in your camery, forget the injectors, forget the air filter, clean the damn EGR valve. it has more to do with fuel consumption then you think, as i went through $30 worth of gass in about 2 days of minimal driving.

Take care everyone , until next time.


Skinnadoor.

[coffee-3000]

Great news. But just curious. How did you ground the spark plug ?
And did you have to remove the EGR valve from the car to clean it ?