Yesterday I bought a wagon 176K miles and drove it home. It had more oil in the engine bay than a porn star getting triple teamed.
I use oven cleaner on all my cars and resto projects, so the little tart got hosed and blown dry with my leaf blower. It sat the night. This AM it wouldn't start. I blew the plugs, distributor internals, electrical connections, fuse boxes, and all electrical parts with compressed air. The plugs were pulled, cleaned and gapped. The battery terminals were disassembled, lubed and cleaned as well as the attached 30 & 80 amp fuses attached to the positive cable.
Still no start. I pulled the air filter and put 3 oz of fuel, for a spit or pop, nothing. The battery is definately weak and I put in on the charger. Still no start. This car has no hi voltage coil.
The cabin fuses were checked and are ok.
Where do I need to check for water? Any else I am missing on this task?
I'd try push-starting it as it's a manual transmission.
Does it crank over? Make sure that the distributor is turning when it does (ie. make sure your timing belt hasn't broken). Then make sure you have spark.
Failing that, it's one of air, fuel, spark or compression. It shouldn't be too difficult to figure out which of those are problematic.
If it turns over and doesn't start, I would go back into the distributer cap again, and make sure it is clean and dry in there.
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'88 Corolla, AE92 SR-5, 7A-FE swap/GT-S suspension
'87 Corolla, AE82 FX-16, 4A-GZE swap (autocrosser)
'03 Tundra 4X4 Access Cab, (FX tow vehicle/Home Depot runner)
Modification: Changing something to what you thought it should have been from the start!
Battery: it died 2x during this adventure- so its got a new one and the car still does not start.
Fuel system. Carburated
Belt: Can's see how washing the engine would break the belt. But I'll double check.
Distributer: I double checked it and blew 100 PSI through it today. I hear the coil is in the distributor and wondered if it shorted when I cranked it when the plugs were discovered to be swimming in water. I put a new cap, wires and plugs- gapped at .034, the ones I pull were at 45. Still no fire.
All trac: Didn't know a wagon model was available. Sounds cool.
Engine series: 4 AF. Where is the ignitor? I wonder if its swimming in water. Anybody got picts of it and the location?
I'll yank plugs and check for spark. I doubt if I have any since the motor wouldn't pop with petrol added to the carb. As mentioned I drove the car home and washed the porn star trail off it. So ....
Where is the spark trail going to lead to given what's been tried? I don't have the book, so the an (pdf) electrical test pattern/steps would be good to have.
Air - presumably fine, hard to cut off the entire air supply by accident.
Fuel - presumably fine, you've added gas directly to the carb.
Compression - presumably fine, it drove to where it's parked.
Spark - probably bad.
If the engine turns over, the problem is probably water in the distributor. If it doesn't even turn over, the starter might be dead.
To check the coil, use a multimeter to measure the resistance between the terminals.
The coil given to me by the local parts house did not match the one I had. This was also the scenario with the distributor cap. Each return resulted in double the cost for the part. So the coil ended up @ $75 out the door. I did a comparative bench test on the OEM and replacement coil.
They spec-ed out the same. I did notice a couple of epoxy cracks in the stock unit, speculating water had seeped internally.
I attempted to bore a hole in it to blow dry it out. That didn't go well. I called an electrical engineer designer. He mentioned that the kind of design of coil might have several layers of systems which might NOT show up a fault without sophisticated test equipment. It was possible that water invaded the coil but residues from the water might still short out the unit. There is a specific chemical " dryer" used for these kinds of things.
So I tossed the old unit out and put the new unit in . I also found a couple of open smog hoses. The fix is in, the car runs fine now. I got lucky, so I'll take it. The previous owner changed oil every 2k miles and it runs smooth.
I like this little wagon, just wish it had a sunroof.
Thanks
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