How To Diagnose Cranking No-Start Conditions

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hey welcome everybody into the NGK tech garage as our title suggests today we are looking at a cranking no start condition on this awesome 2002 Honda Civic Si 2-liter that's sitting here besides me the problem with this thing obviously is a no crank condition the complaint from the customer was that he was driving this thing down the road I was driving perfectly fine no issues he parked it went back out to it later that day I went to start it up and it didn't fire her up so came here on the back of a tow truck and we're gonna go over a bunch of the testing related to no crank excuse-me related to cranking no starts so I'm not gonna be able to cover every single test I can't teach you everything today about cranking no starts we're gonna go over a lot of the highlights a lot of the things to look at and kind of the way that I go through these approaches in an efficient manner taking possible tests that we don't think are the problem moving them down the list and checking things in an efficient time manner so that we're looking at things that are actually vital to the operation of this specific vehicle but the tests that we're gonna do today are gonna be relevant for just about any vehicle on the road with a cranking no start condition so the t-shirts were already brought up here in the comments guys we have a new design it's been approved I think they're at the printer right now getting printed I'm fingers crossed for March that will have new t-shirts we'll see but they are awesome I can guarantee you that you guys are going to love the look of the new shirts no Donuts yeah no Donuts here today unfortunately so let's let's get right into this now when we're looking at cranking mill starts we can use a variety of tools I have this bench full and you guys probably can't see it but bench over here is full of tools as well we can use simple things like test lights noid lights compression gauge spark tester voltmeter kind of thing or we could go with some complex more it's called modern testing and use the lab scope with amp clamps and voltage probes and those kinds of things and it's gonna be a matter of first of all what you have in your toolbox what you have at your disposal and then also the the way that you want to tackle this problem so quickly here before we get into actually looking at the car let's just go over real quick what it takes for an engine to start up first of all we got to have an ignition source on this engine it'll be sparking as a diesel that's a different story but we need to have good spark intensity and we have to control our spark somehow our PCM or whatever it might be if it's a distributor style car whatever it is we have to control when the spark happens of course we need some sort of fuel we have to have proper pressure and volume of our fuel we got to have proper fuel quality this car is not 85 so we can't run ethanol fuel in here or we can't have water in there and then we got to have proper fuel control of our fuel pump of our injectors we need to have air entering in right we got to mix our fuel with our air and ignite it right so we got to be able to inhale and exhale out of this engine we got to make sure our valves are opening and closing properly and we got to make sure every VT system is potentially not an issue and then lastly we got to squeeze everything together before we light on fire so we got to have compression those are our four necessary needed pieces to start an engine now what's nice about cranking no start conditions and what we're gonna talk about today is that you can relate a lot of the tests that we're doing today over to specific cylinder misfire diagnosis okay or multiple cylinder misfired I'd really and cranking no start is essentially a misfire or a lack of firing event on multiple cylinders generally speaking we're looking at something that affects more than half of the engine so one of the biggest things that gets forgotten about when we're talking know starts and looking at some best practices here it's forgetting about timing it's possible on an engine to have fuel have spark have air entering in and out maybe maybe maybe having proper compression but if our spark doesn't occur at the right time if our injector doesn't squirt it into the cylinder at the right time if ever if our timing is off of when those things happen the engine won't start so that's another that's a really good thing to keep in mind when you start off you're dying so when we're doing a nose start but it cranks over we're looking for things that can generally affect more than half of the engine a lot of engines will run multiple cylinders down a V style six cylinder 8 cylinder engine can probably run on four cylinders they may even be able to run on three maybe it might depend on the engine this four cylinder engine might be able to run on two I guess it depends on the conditions but we're really generally focused on something in a broad picture that's going to affect the entire engine when we get to cylinder misfire diag single cylinder issues that kind of thing we're really honed in on one hole here we're gonna be focused on the entire engine in the entire control circuits now something we can maybe assume is that the battery is probably ok if this engine cranks over and doesn't start it's probably okay but this is granted that cranking speed is normal okay it's possible that somebody tried to get this thing start and they cranked and cranked and cranked until the battery died just make sure that your battery is up to snuff before we even start this this because it's possible especially in an older car if you have a low cranking rpm with a variable reluctance style sensor we might not be able to create enough voltage getting enough amplitude out of that sensor that's required to convert that signal for like a crank sensor potentially and we could have a no start condition because they're cranking rpm might be too low so if in doubt ever throw a jump pack on it throw a charger on it I have a charger sitting here because we might kill the battery from a lot of cranking over today it's always good to just have those things at the ready okay cranking cadence the way the engine cranks over can tell us a lot but this is something that takes practice and experience on vehicles if it's a high compression mode or low compression motor that kind of thing that's gonna take experience and just as an example here guys now I haven't diagnosed a lot of 2-liter Honda's but I'm pretty sure that the battery that's in my lawnmower is larger than the battery in this in this little Civic right here so I'm not expecting a super normal cranking cadence out of the Signet I don't know really off the time I had what a normal cranking cadence is gonna be I'm and expect some rpm and I'm gonna expect to hear something that sounds like compression but we'll we'll get to that so what do we do for first steps when looking at a problem like this well first always verify the problem right so let's go over here and go ahead and I'm gonna crank this thing over and for those of you that know the Civic Si is they I think all came in manual for testing purposes today I did jump the clutch switch if that were the case if a clutch switch were the problem on here we would have a no crank no start condition okay the engine wouldn't crank over at all because it doesn't see the clutch pedal push down I have the car on the hoist it's not going anywhere today so I've jumped the clutch there so I can just reach in and crank this thing over so let's take a listen to what it sounds like a rhythmic thump thump thump thump now I don't know how well you guys can hear that because my microphone is attached to me and not overhead here but the engine cranked over I was getting this rhythmic thump thump thump thump out of it like something was happening and it looks like there was a little bit of smoke here it looks almost like it backfired through the intake manifold something happened there and by the way if we take an overhead shot here I did remove the air filter off of here already this had this big carbon fiber thingy I don't know some high-performance maybe air filter but I did I did remove the entire air filter assembly so I could very easily put a battery charger on this thing so that's the reason why that's off of there right now so next step after we verify the complaint do the next easiest thing check for codes look at live data on here engine coolant temp is a huge huge issue potentially for cranking you know start concern should an engine coolant temp sensor go open or become shorted it's possible to PCM could go into like a default style value where your coolant temp sensor could read negative 40 or maybe 255 degrees or whatever it would be pre-programmed into the computer at a faulty sensor now it's possible if our engine were to have a bad coolant temp sensor we would see it on the scan tool and it would cause that engine to change the injector pulse with our fuel injector control because of the way the coolant temp sensor is is reporting back to the computer while we're cranking the engine okay so coolant temp sensor will affect fuel control always check that so let's take a look at our live data and we'll see what we've got here so key is currently on actually I didn't pull codes yet I don't have any codes in here but I'll just show you guys that no fault codes detected live data and what we're doing here is again this is kind of a practice and experience thing but what we're looking for are anomalies we're looking for things that don't quite make sense okay so ECT sensor one temperature right now 68 degrees the cars been sitting in here overnight so I think that is a logical number intake air temp a little bit warmer at 71 point 6 right here so those two sensors look pretty good now we do have an engine speed pad which is kind of nice so what I'm gonna do I'll crank this thing over and see if we get a reaction out of our engine speed all right so we saw a couple sensors bouncing around right we saw map changing and we did see an engine speed being recorded on the scan too so whatever is in control of giving the PCM information for engine speed on this vehicle is sending that signal off and giving us what about 200 250 rpm cranking so is it a crank sensor problem well we haven't determined that it's not a crank sensor problem but we've determined that the crank sensor is most likely doing something so we're gonna take that from maybe towards the top of our list and we're gonna move that down towards the bottom that's not going to be one of my first tests on this vehicle just make sure everybody's up to speed here pull the distributor cap this one doesn't have a distributor cap three-bed plug wires this is a timing chain motor by the way somebody here saying timing belt broken this is a chain motor on this 2 liter alright I'm gonna get back to it here okay so after colds and coolant temp check for TS B's right it's always a good idea so I already have identifying this to be a pretty easy way to look for TS B is so I just did a no start run a no to civic SI two-liter no start 5 related TS B's bringing us to different immobilizer system TS B's so if we go ahead and take a look at one it's talking about the immobilizer system on MDX is our your s X's basically telling us about what the immobilizer system is doing on here looking for an indicator ignition switch may be related may not be so a lot of immobilizer stuff so let's talk immobilizer right security security security is a huge factor for cranking no stars especially on modern cars right security is vital because this is still a key in ignition style car push button start cars with proximity keys security is vital because we don't want that car being started by someone else so we could have an anti-theft event creating this thing not to start so what we want to do is we want to look for that flashing security telltale on our dash on our cluster wherever it might be most cars with some sort of security system will flash either a red light or in this example Honda uses a green flashing key on the dash to signal and anti-theft event it's basically a not allowing the cars start because it thinks the car may be stolen so a lot of cars will disable fuel control during an anti-theft event there are a lot of cars that will start and stall also during an anti-theft event so keep that stuff in mind cranking this thing over I do not have a theft light on on the dash now question comes in what if my theft light is burned out right it could happen what's nice is a lot of scan tools will give you the information that you're looking for and somewhere in here I have immobilizer okay immobilizer is set to run now the way this scan tool translates that out if we had an anti-theft event if there was an issue this thing would read ban ba n meaning it's not allowing it to crank over at that point my green theft light would be flashing as I was cranking this thing over and I would not be getting fuel into our cylinders so security is a huge thing always take a quick peek at that so after looking at those things we've checked codes live data made sure security lights not on now what what do we do we need to pick a path right we have basically four elements needed to get this engine to start we need our spark we need our fuel we need air entering and leaving the cylinder and we need to squeeze that mixture inside of the cylinder four distinct paths with very different testing to go down now you have to decide where you want to go first and you can use some let's call it some telltale signs of what path maybe will go down so maybe if it's a few if you're thinking it's a fueling issue you turn the key on does the fuel pump prime when you're cranking it over do you mell fuel there's really no way to know cranking it over if you have spark it's kind of hard to tell maybe is the engine trying to trying to start maybe sputtering but not actually firing up is it trying to not start at all what is it doing is the cranking cadence funny maybe we're going after a mechanical issue with either air or compression we have this path to go down and judging by a little bit of experience as you go through a job like this will lead you down a path and lead you to your solution generally a lot faster now I chose fuel first that's just what I chose when I laid this class out but we're gonna check all four aspects today so if we start on testing fuel fuel pressure is a big one right our engine needs a certain amount of pressure in order to start so is our fuel pressure sorry about that Dave is there feel pressure in spec it's a simple no go no go test right is it in spec is it not some rails do have a test port some don't some vehicles especially newer vehicles have a feel rail pressure sensor so you could look at a pit on the scan tool to tell you that you might or might not have fuel pressure depends on the vehicle right this vehicle first of all has a cover over a field rail so got to take a cover off if I wanna get to it right and I guess I guess we can do that quick just to show you guys but normally in a normal diagnostic situation I wouldn't be pulling this cover yet because I have to take something apart is there way that I can do this not intrusive ly now pulling a cover like this not a big deal it took 20 seconds right super fast super simple but what if your injectors are sitting under the intake what if something else is it what if they're bared what if you can't get to the connectors there's easier tests that we can do but let's let's stay on fuel pressure right now if we look under here here's our feel rail right here's our feel rail we have all four of our injectors super simple to get to on this engine super easy but we don't have any Schrader valve on this feel rail and it looks like I have a quick disconnect fitting right here for our rail now feel pressure testing you can rent a gauge set if you want I'm not going to show testing the pressure today okay it's a time consuming test I have to pull that off I have to put my pressure gauge in line after leak fuel all over the ground I'm not going to do that today for this vehicle now we can maybe assume that fuel pressure is okay when I crank this thing over for an extended period of time line here I can smell fuel okay I can smell gasoline if I go back by the tailpipe I can smell fuel so maybe in a normal situation if you were working on this thing in the shop you might not go after fuel first maybe you're looking at spark or compression or breathing of the engine first but we're just we're gonna stick with fuel first of all here so let's talk fuel volume now during a cranking situation when we're talking fuel volume what's good and what isn't fuel volume is one of those things where we have to have enough fuel to make the car run right but at cranking and at idle our car doesn't really require a ton of fuel this is where questioning the customer really comes in handy usually a fuel volume issue will result in a pressured problem when cranking but if this car were a complaint from the customer of a drivability concern lack of power at high rpm that was generally and consistently getting worse I might be looking at a pressure volume issue because we when our engine is under high load it requires them amount of fuel right it takes the most fuel to start the or to run the engine under high load I probably don't have a feel valium issue that's another one of those tested I'm going to move towards the bottom of the list we're not gonna completely discount it at this point but it's gonna be towards the bottom fuel quality not something that I check right away again towards the bottom of the list water ethanol old fuel the customer has been driving this thing daily so I don't think it's an old fuel problem there hasn't been a rash of complaints in this area for water in the tank type of thing where maybe a gas station had a punctured tank that allowed water in not a not an issue in this area this guy doesn't have any crazy ex-girlfriends that are messing with this car or anything like that an ethanol he claims that he has not put 85 in this vehicle now it's not really too hard of a test to do if you already have your field pressure gauge hooked up just open up the one valve right dump some fuel in a fuel safe container and let it settle see what it looks like the fuel will sit on top of the water or ethanol and let them separate out if you have a 50/50 mix you got an issue in there unless it's an e85 car that they're running partial that's an all it's another story but if you're sitting with a lot of ethanol and a little bit of fuel on top you probably have 85 in there if you're mostly fuel and it looks okay we're probably okay at that point fuel pump control I like this one I want to know that my fuel pump is working power and ground we can use current draw fuel pump control is a great test if we're not hearing the fuel pump turn on now this vehicle I turn the key on and the filled pump Prime's I have fuel pump control the fuel pump is turning on I can hear it but if it were a case where you're not able to hear it you would want to be checking this so we're gonna start with this test today because this is something that's a relatively good quick test that we can do so if we go ahead and take a look at a wiring diagram for our fuel pump here let's see how this thing works poetry and engine control believe it's in this first diagram here yeah fuel tank unit right here so it's running to a ground under the passenger seat we have our fuel pump motor inside of there yellow wire running through a relay which power flows from a 17 whew 17 which is under the - 15 amp fuse so basically what we have is I got the whiteboard all today guys and markers we're gonna get a little artistic so we have a 15 amp fuse going through a through a relay right we have a coil inside of the relay that well that's actually drawn wrong we'll draw it this way right the magnetic field from the coil of the relay pulls our contact closed and we go to our fuel pump here and then our fuel pump on this one is grounded all the time with a chassis ground alright that's our basic test now a lot of people what do you want to do first check power and ground with a pump right if our pumps not turning on we want to check power and ground so you go back there with a test light you go back there maybe with a voltmeter but how many times our fuel pump connector is easy to get to maybe some vehicles they are maybe some vehicles there and it's not a consistent test to get to basically this connector to check for power and ground back there that's a pain in the rear to do in my opinion plus we have to have a car up on a hoist we have to be underneath it could be rusty under there there's a lot of variables involved is there a better test that we can do and I think I have it in here no we don't okay that's fine what we can do is get out the handy dandy amp clamp and we can measure the current draw on the fuel pump now what our current draw tells us it tells us one the fuel pump is working because we can if we see an amperage draw from the pump we can see the health of the pump if it's working and that has to verify that we have power flow and we have ground side connection we have it circuit integrity that tells us the relay is working that tells us we have circuit integrity down to the pump that tells us our pump is working that tells us we have circuit integrity on our ground all we have to do is take our 15 amp out and install a fused Oh install a fuse jumper lead in place of it okay so we put our fuse jumper lead in there with the exact same sized fuse in it this 15 amp fuse with that in there put an amp clamp around this guy and we can measure current on the circuit so I've already hooked up amp clamps under the dash unfortunately it's the under - fuse box but here's a picture I have to under there right now we'll get to the second one in a little bit but we have our and clamp right here around fuel around the fuel pump so I'm gonna actually go over there and turn it on right now because I didn't want to add batteries so I'm turning it on 20 amp and we're gonna go ahead and set the lab scope up to read that 20 amp mode oh hello alright we're a little froze up there well grab negative 5 to 10 amps usually a fuel pumps like around the four to six ish maybe three to six ish amp range will grab a good good two seconds per division here and let me go ahead and hit the key so like I said this fuel pump does prime so I'm gonna keep cycling nothing because well guys it helps if you actually hook the amp clamp up to the scope you know I mean that would be kind of a a no-brainer there hook the amp clamp to the scope before you try to perform any testing let's try that again I'm in a key cycle key off key on there we see our pump turn on it primed for roughly what a second and a half two seconds and now I'm going to crank all right so we got some something's going on something's happening let's take a look at what we've got on there so already just by looking at this we can confirm that we've power and ground to our fuel pump because we are pulling current when we turn that fuel pump over so power and ground relays okay that looks ok so let's take a look as we zoom in and we'll get even closer and even closer still and we can go even closer still and we're looking for nice peaks and valleys here this is a little bit worrisome I don't like to see this at the bottom but we want to see pretty even nice Peaks here this filled pump doesn't look horrible ok it looks pretty good this wouldn't be my number one concern on this vehicle and especially because I can smell fuel we know it's turning on now what a known bad looks like here is a Corolla that was told in known bad if we go ahead zoom in on that you can see how nasty that looks a lot of spikes here then if we look at a known good same vehicle with a new fuel pump in it we will see a beautiful looking pattern ok looks really nice nice and smooth a little bit of stuff down here but nothing too serious looks good ok that's what we're looking for for fuel pump current so a quick test like that you pull the fuse out you pull just the cover off the fuse box I didn't have to hoist the car didn't even have to look at the gas tank at all and I can confirm that the fuel pump is functioning all right so good good quick test if you don't have your feel pump priming if it's not priming then you could have an issue with relay control you could have a circuit integrity issue you could have a ground issue or you could have a fuel pump issue that you're gonna have to look in to diagnose oh just seeing gets paid by the hour yeah that's good Eric the reason this is just one example of a car and you have a very you have a lot of experience looking at null starts of course so you can hear that the timing may be off on this engine and that's great but for a lot of people out there they can't hear that they might not notice that so we're gonna run through all the tests today so that anybody can apply this to any car on the road that and I'm hourly no I'm just kiddin I wouldn't be performing this test on this vehicle if it were in the bay at the shop and I was getting paid to diagnose it so on to the next test injectors control power ground and current draw right are you gonna take a Lloyd Light tests light a voltmeter whatever it is and test power and ground of the injector on a vehicle that you have to pull an intake manifold off or on a vehicle that you can't get to the injector connector it's a pain in the rear to do right it's not gonna I'm not gonna take the time to do that if it's hard to do this one is easy to do this one is a take a shield off and we can we can look at our injector so what we'll do is we'll do this a couple different ways all in one test enoyed light we're gonna put that in place of the injector this is substituting the load of the injector so we'll put that on injector number one like so now when we crank this over that light should blink if that light blinks that tells us we have power and we have control in the PCM for this injector it's our ground path so fuel injector I guess we could probably use a similar diagram to this it could be relay control let's call this an hour our fuel injector let's erase that so this is now a fuel injector and generally what we have is ground side control inside the PCM okay so there's a switch basically inside of the PCM that turns on and off which is our ground path for our injector so when our injector is being turned on the PCM closes the switch and grounds the circuit we turn our injector on now what's cool about injector circuits ignition coils are similar generally speaking this is a four-cylinder car I know my injectors aren't all the same size or the same shape it doesn't matter generally speaking fuel injector circuits are all fed through the same power feed through the same let's it's probably I think it's a 15 amp fuse on here through the same 15 amp fuse and then inside of the PCM they are all grounded individually with different color wires all right like so so what we can do is we could put a noid light on each injector and make sure that each injector is working on here or what if we throw our amp clamp but a fuse jumper lead in place of this guy and we'll see all four injectors pulling current by seeing all four of those injectors pulling current that verifies we have power we have ground side control and our injectors aren't shorted our injectors aren't open so by taking enoyed light on here we verified power and ground side control but we haven't verified the injector we could maybe ohm test it I don't like ohm testing but it's possible by using a lab scope by using the amp clamp we are testing the circuit as it's designed as it was whole and it just saves us from doing a bunch of other testing now not everybody has annoyed lights set so I'm gonna go ahead and we're gonna use a test light as well and I just wanted to show you guys the differences in amperage so let me grab some pins here from the kit if you guys need a good pin on kit get this thing the AES wave kit there's a link below in the description but fantastic kit that's got just about everything you could ever need for pinning out connect all right there's one hopefully my head's not in the way one two all right and what we're gonna do is maybe hopefully I'm gonna take this test slide here and go something like this and what we're doing is we're substituting the load at this point so we have two injectors plugged in working in their circuit and then we have one injector hooked up to our test light one injector hooked up to enoyed light and now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to pull the fuse for our fuel pump which is luckily under the hood on here it's this little 15 amp right here and actually here's what I'm gonna show you guys so 15 amp fuse in there I got a 15 amp fuse in my jumper lead put that guy in place get out my current clamp and actually remember to hook it up this time somewhere is my other clamp right in front of me all right around our circuit there and we'll go we'll take that one back out go in channel one make sure everybody's clear bring up the lab scope and now what we'll see is we will see our circuit should be pulling amperage and it should should blink our lights right all right all right so we saw an amperage change there and here we go all right so just so you guys had a good look at it both lights are blinking I could see that and we have spikes in our amperage okay so let's go ahead and zoom in I'll just grab one what's looks like one cycle all right so here's I wanted to have those two different loads in here so I can show you guys maybe what a bad injector would look like or just a different load elements right I mean we have a test light we have a noid light in there so we're just looking at these different load elements and what they actually pull for currents so we're measuring current on the entire system and as we look at this we have two high pulses right so basically a square wave turning on turning off square wave turning on turning off and then a very low pattern here at peak amperage on that is it seems kind of high but three ish amps I don't think my clamp is zeroed because we're starting here that doesn't look right let me um let me zero the clamp of key on once so we can get an accurate amperage reading because I have a feeling yeah we're sitting right now at two-and-a-half amps there we go let's start at zero that way we can get some somewhat of a decent amperage reading and again alright so I just turned the key off and let's take a look at that one more time now that we can have a more accurate reading so the two spikes and actually we missed two spikes there that's interesting so two spikes a low spike ad looking spike in and two spikes so these two right here could signal a a bad injector or something I again have different loads in place just to show you guys what kind of amperage draw we're looking at our test site here is the low amperage draw it just under an amp 900 ish 985 looks to be a roughly our peak our noid light here was a little surprising but we peaked at one and a half amps ish one and a half-ish out of annoyed light okay be careful be careful be careful when you're substituting loads in a circuit incandescent test light can burn out computer controlled circuits okay LED test light bulb meter looking at voltage on a scope or current clamping like we're doing here is going to be the proper way to test but what we're seeing here is injector control operating properly if I plug in these two injectors back in we will have four perfect even square waves there now we don't know that they're actually opening by this test but again I can smell fuel they have to be opening there somehow fuel getting into the cylinders okay so that is basically fuel testing right I think we've checked everything on here besides pressure and volume and quality right which are tests that are commonly shown all over the internet you can find testing on how to do that just I don't have enough time today we're already 35 minutes in we got a lot more to do questions on fuel alright all right so now we can start looking at ignition we've looked at fuel now let's start looking at ignition so spark tester is a very basic tool works good when you can get to the spark plug when you can get to the ignition coil when you can get to the spark plug wire or whatever it is this engine not too bad right what about an engine where they're buried under the intake of v6 v8 where the intakes over the top maybe can't get to the spark plugs it's a pain in the butt to do spark test is a good test it's quick and easy when you can get to the end result when you can get to the spark plug now what about coils testing coil power and ground check and power and ground is great I mean you can use your voltmeter test power and ground but what that doesn't do is that doesn't confirm that the circuit is able to flow anything at all so what's nice with ignition coils and the reason I have an amp clamp under the dash right now is because this test with fuel injectors right here we can replicate the exact same thing for ignition coils but I'm just gonna start fresh here on this vehicle this is not your standard 2 2 wire ignition coil sorry what we're looking at here is a 3 wire ignition coil so if we go back to our diagram and we scroll down ignition coils on here are smart coil so each coil is fed looks like ground all the time on the black wire then our black and white wire goes to a splice pack so our ground and our power are spliced together and then each coil has a single colored wire yellow and green blue and red white and blue white and blue and brown going back to PCM control ok so basically what we're seeing here is I think it's a 15 amp fuse again going feeding most likely to a relay but we'll just draw out the coils here because time constraint again so we have basically our power being split iced and fed to all four of our ignition coils okay so one two three four all right all four of our coils are being fed power now in a normal two wire coil we would have individual colored wires generally going to the PCM and like so and each of these wires would go to essentially a switch inside a PCM that turns on sorry for writing sideways its turns on inside of the PCM sore coils would charge up but according to the wiring diagram these are three wire coils so what's unique about these guys is they each have their own consistent ground feed that's tied in to they're all spliced into a main main lead for the ground feed so these coils I believe this is anytime the key is on we have power fed and ground fed to them at all times and then our PCM down here supplies a signal to a small module inside of each coil that tells the primary circuit to turn on and turn off okay the benefit of a system like this is the fact that the PCM is not handling the coil load so if the coil pulls let's just throw a number out there at let's say five amps the five amps flows on the power circuit and the ground circuit it does not flow inside of the PCM so that video that I had on the Ford Fusion where it's smoked to PCM right we burned up the driver inside of the PCM that was a two wire coil the PCM was handling those five amps or whatever it was inside of that circuit so if we short out a coil winding internally we over feed a coil with current we lower resistance current goes up in this aspect generally speaking will only smoke the coil the PCM is protected because this is a low amperage circuit so with that in mind those of you who are using tests lights those of you who are using noid lights whatever it is be careful okay you can check power and ground with the test light right these are amperage flowing circuits do not test this circuit with the test light this circuit is not intended to flow the amperage required to light this bulb in the test light you could ruin the driver inside of the PCM it's possible to have current limiting that kind of stuff built-in but by rule of thumb do not test a computerized circuit like this with a test light or annoyed light or anything that's gonna pull load on the circuit because you can ruin this circuit right here okay we're gonna want to look at these individual controls with a lab scope okay so why don't we go ahead and do that so like I said I already have that amp clamp hooked up under the dash on the ignition coil feed fuse get this one out of the way and I'm gonna get that amp clamp turned on that'll run on channel a and my favorite part about this whole thing is we can perform almost all of our ignition tests in just a minute I'm going to run them all at once so I've just plugged our injectors back in and because this one is easy to get to we're gonna go ahead and we'll throw the spark tester on it because well might as well show it right for those of you that are having to work a little bit harder normally on this engine at this point I would not be pulling this I would just be in the fuse box looking at and there they go into the drain we'll get those later so here's our coil and as you guys can see yellow black and black and white so power ground and signal control going into our three wire ignition coil so what we'll do is we'll leave this guy plugged in we'll throw our spark tester on here yeah we'll go about the spark testers got markings I will go about 10,000 volts required something like that it's that should look good so then we should see we should see that guy spark and then let's hook another channel into the sculpt so we currently have the current probe hooked up on the feed circuit so we're looking current right here so if we show current here that kind of tells me that the rest of the circuit is it's good to go right if all four coils pull amperage but I'm also gonna look at the control and we'll just look at the control and coil one which is our yellow wire so I'm just going to hook our lab scope up to coil control for numero uno find a good ground here guess we'll go right back to the battery and we should be able to get a ton of information very quickly here sure this guy up first now we're back probing you can Pierce do however you want to test that's completely up to you and now now I want to prove a little bit of a point here I have this guy right here this says 30 amp clamp this is a very sensitive very low amperage clamp so what we're gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and get this guy hooked up and I'm gonna put this and clamp right here okay around our signal wire and I'm going to show you guys that there's very little to no current flow on our signal wire okay so let's get this hooked around here now unfortunately I would have to disassemble this whole loom if I would want to get away from our coils so we most likely will be picking up some interference because we're using an inductive style clamp basically directly on top of an ignition coil probably not the best decision because it will give us a lot of noise but it's just going to show the point here without me having to take a bunch of stuff apart so what we're going to look at on our scope we're gonna set channel a up for coil current so coil current is gonna be blue will set channel B up for voltage that's gonna be our ignition voltage so we'll put that at 20 volts see how accurate that is in the channel C again we're looking at current on our 30 amp clamp and we'll look at a low number on there let's just go one amp that guy alright so everybody should be hooked up and let's crank this thing over see what happens alright Keyon I'm gonna wait for the scope to to refresh and actually let me zoom you guys in a little there you go how about that now we can probably see that spark happen yeah that's fine laptops freaking out a little I think we missed here our spark tester doesn't want to stay in place and I think we're missing out on that let's try that again okay let's see what we see all right so blue again is the current control for our ignition coil red is cylinder one's ignition control and green is amperage for cylinder one for the signal circuit okay so what we see blue is that each coil is currently pulling at peak roughly 7 amps or so with that coil so that means our primary windings are intact we're creating that magnetic field our coil is functioning properly red is our coil control that's being turned on if we were missing coil control I wouldn't expect to see an amperage draw here right that just makes sense we wouldn't see an ampere draw there now if we look really close in here see that let's bring this guy back down okay obviously this high spiked green right here over on this side when the coil shuts off that's when we're inducing onto the secondary secondary windings inside of that coil so we're getting interference our coil is picking up RFI at that point all right Sue's me our amp clamp is picking up RFI at that point but look at this signal here let's measure that at peak the coil turn-on signal from the PCM I'm recording it at at peak 176 milliamps okay super low amperage excuse me super low amperage on our signal circuit okay do not load test a signal circuit you're gonna you're gonna get yourself in trouble you're gonna create a problem potentially that wasn't there before so this test right here didn't take long to set up technically would have never had to pull anything apart on this engine if we were just going off the fuse off of the current we're able to confirm that each of our coils is currently functional the PCM is controlling them they are being fed power in ground they can flow current our circuit is intact our coils are functioning now at this point we don't exactly know what's happening inside of the cylinder we don't know if our spark plugs are in good shape we don't know any of that stuff but we know that our coils functioning so maybe you go to the next step and you pull a spark plug you take a look at it chances are after all this cranking this plug on here is probably fold out let's take a look yep so there's a there's fuel on there raw fuel it's wet it's shiny this plug is fold but what do we always talk about when we're testing root cause right is this the cause or the effect of a failure is this spark plug fouled out right now because the engine is not starting or is it the reason the engine is not starting so at this point are you selling a set of spark plugs to just give it a shot I guess that's between you and the customer but we haven't verified two different things that we have not verified if the engine can breathe and if we can build compression all right questions on ignition I'm not sure if we were able to see this thing spark I couldn't see it when I was cranking but if I was out here holding it together it does spark the coil does send spark down there we could look at we could look at primary voltage potentially on the ignition coil on a two wire coil because primary reflects the secondary on a coil like this it's harder because of the the module inside of there now what we could do you can buy yourself a set of leads that go from the coil here down let me zoom you guys back out so you can see though I'm talking about so you could buy a lead set that goes basically in the end of the coil here it's just a spark plug wire essentially down out of the spark plug then we could go ahead and look at secondary ignition and we could look at the waveform we could see if that secondary ignition event was properly happening okay there's a really awesome class that's been put out on that I believe it was Jim Morton that taught that and Brandon actually taught it once as well fantastic class on reading secondary waveform it's definitely worth something worth worth checking out but again it's one of those tests that we're not we're not going to cover today just because we are almost an hour in already questions on ignition as far as lab scopes I I think we've talked about this in the past and I understand that not everybody can buy a Pico sculpt justify spending thousands of dollars on a lab scope go out to AES wave get yourself the little you scope it's a single channel it's cost-effective and it's a great tiny little running gun scope pull out of your pocket hook it up you can check current you could check your voltage on a single channel and generally what we've been testing here you can do a single channel test to do that and also the tests that we're gonna do next is one of the most efficient tests and you can do that also with the u scope so you don't need the Pico scope for everything I would probably use the use scope more on camera if I could wire it directly in to get a video feed for it it's just the Pico scope placed so nicely off of the laptop so you guys can see it in full resolution but there are a lot of scopes out there for not a lot of money so the excuse of the scope being super expensive for a professional technician I mean how many of you guys have bought the the knives or the machetes or whatever off of the the tool truck or the decorative mug or the jacket or all the other novelties stuff that you can buy off the tool truck if you didn't buy any of that you could have bought a scope and been more efficient at diag so get a scope whatever you whatever you do however you get it done get yourself a lab scope you will use it for the most simple of tests it will save you time and money and increase your overall efficiency okay that being said let's go on to the fun part this is gonna be my favorite part so we've checked oh I got a little ahead here but basically checking power and ground is not load testing the circuit primary current draws the quickest easiest test for testing coil operation and control from the computer okay so we verified fuel we've verified spark now we get to the fun part testing err testing the engine breathing we need to verify that our engine can breathe inhale is something restricting our air do we have a plugged up air filter did we suck up a bag into the engine into the air filter and we can't inhale any air into do we have an exhaust issue do we have a restriction do we have a plugged cat do we have a cat that's broken apart and blocking the exhaust do we have an EGR issue maybe an EGR the stuck wide open it's unlikely that an EGR issue would be able to create enough pressure to offset the amount of air at cranking but it could definitely be a drivability issue but an exhaust restriction we need to bring air into the engine and then we need to be able to efficiently exhale or exhaust that air without being able to do that our engine is not going to start we could also have a valve timing issue something to do with the valves opening or closing or the valves being opened or closed or them hanging open or sticking closed or just the way that it all works together our valve timing is critical opening at the wrong time and then we get to compression now I like to loop these two kind of into the same frame of testing okay compression and air we need to have air in the cylinder too in order to have something to compress so they kind of go hand-in-hand with this testing and will kind of do everything together as one here for this so we could do a traditional compression test okay we have a gauge right here in an old dirty box that sits at the bottom of the toolbox because well here we're doing it the modern way we have a pressure transducer this is the new-age way to look at cylinder compression the problem with a compression test is that first of all and and with with this tool also we have to pull the plug which is time consuming and a compression test is only going to read peak compression unless we take the Schrader valve out of the gauge and we watch the needle blah blah blah takes two people usually because you can't crank it over and see it at the same time it's just a lot nicer to get yourself a pressure transducer now I know this is an expensive tool not everybody has one but it is in a super efficient way to see in real time what's happening inside of our cylinder not just at the peak level of compression but everything that happens in between with our valves and our piston it is a fantastic tool that will pay for itself in the long run but it is a pricy unit so we'll talk about that but before we even get to going in cylinder because some cylinders are hard to get to right and take me folds blah-blah-blah-blah hard to get to this is my favorite test I think it's my favorite test on a vehicle relative compression now some scan tools have the ability to do this I use the lab scope it works fantastic but what our goal here is to show essentially a window into the mechanical health of the engine by looking at how much energy to start or draws now you can do this via voltage drop across the battery our voltage on the system will go down when our starter requires more power when our piston comes up on compression our valves are closed we require the starter to work harder so our voltage level would go down or our current being drawn by the starter should go up so relative compression will take and record that current or voltage over time so we can see as this engine is cranking over it's one of the quickest fastest ways to figure out engine health without taking anything apart that's what I prefer to do on this vehicle in the shop that was my first test because experience told me that this thing doesn't sound quite right when it's cranking over now Eric had said the same thing in the comments why are we checking fuel and spark when we're thinking that it's a timing issue he's perfectly right I wanted to show those tests because that's what you're gonna see on a day to day basis and no stark conditions you want to be able to check those things efficiently and quickly but with experience it's shown me that this engine probably has a mechanical issue relative compression is going to give us a great idea and then we're gonna go in cylinder as well so in cylinder pressure testing again is just amazing for showing peak compression and telling us what other tools can telling us the in between the peaks is being able to see what's actually happening inside of there so let's get right to it any question favorite test is a drive test okay depends on the vehicle I suppose a 1 liter little three cylinder engine probably not a very fun driving test but all right I don't think I'm guys if I've missed any comments this has just been going insane here but if I've missed any comments please somebody somebody speak up now what is your question Keith how many my oh this vehicles got a hundred and one hundred and sixty-one I think something like that it was a hundred and they just verified 159 394 so just under one hundred and sixty K timing chain motor can we get an idea on timing by using spark and annoyed at the same time visually well I would think in theory and then you're gonna put me on the spot here spark should happen at roughly peak compression right so Pistons at the top or just before 10 maybe 10 degrees before top dead center is when spark should happen so if we can see that spark happening but chances are they wouldn't happen at the same time right if they happen at the same time we'd probably have an issue because we're not going to spray fuel on the compression stroke that would on a port fuel injection vehicle will require the intake valve to be open on the compression stroke which doesn't make any sense right how do you build pressure with an intake valve open on a port filled injected vehicle direct injection will change that but on a port filled injection like this one our injector will spray on the backside of the valve during the intake stroke right then our intake valve has to close when we bring that piston up on compression so theoretically speaking you could probably get a judgement roughly on timing by looking at injector pulse with a noid light or whatever and ignition control the injector should flash and then the spark should go injector should flash and the spark should go they should not happen at the same time ERI is due process very fairly fairly slow sure but I think you should I think you should notice a difference visually on a port fuel-injected vehicle because we have to spray fuel when the intake valve is open so that it can find its way into the cylinder right and then we close the intake valve we bring that piston up on compression and we ignite it okay but again direct injection changes all that because we could be injecting during the compression stroke right theoretically we have an injector in the hole in the cylinder bring that piston up on compression we have very very high pressure to overcome cylinder pressure and we spray that fuel atomized it down in the cylinder shortly before the ignition events so port feel a little bit different obviously direct injection different as well okay I have a lot of stuff on the vehicle let me get all this stuff out of the way we're done looking at compression at the moment our spark plug is still in the sill we're done looking at ignition spark plugs still in the cylinder let's get all this crap out of the way and now with relative compression guys it's usually a good idea to use an ignition sync you could use an injector sync but I prefer ignition because ignition again should happen 10 degrees before TDC right roughly ish an injector sink you might get thrown off a little bit the injectors gonna open at a different time so using an ignition sync should give us a relative idea of when cylinder 1 is at TDC and then we'll compare that and it also gives us a sync mark on our relative compression so we can apply firing order figure out if we have an issue so we're using a 200 mm amp clamp on this engine and I'm gonna put this right around the battery cable be single positive or negative current is consistent in a circuit if you can ideally you would want to separate out just the starter wire but that's not always possible so I'm just going to go I'm going literally right around the clamp for the battery positive zoom you guys out a little all right battery battery positive something like that we're hooked into we swap these around we'll stick with current on channel 1 voltage channel 2 and be careful guys don't go cranking cars over with coils exposed like this that energy wants to go somewhere and you can blow the brains out of the coil ok our coil would still be being controlled but it's that energy wants to go somewhere our primary is still charging up even though we're not connected to ground at this point just be very very careful you don't want to run cars with coils exposed not grounding ok you can end up with interference which I believe hopefully this coil still works which I believe is why our scan or our scope was dropping out when I was crank the engine over I don't think our coil here was getting to ground to our spark tester and I think it was catching a ton of RFI maybe and making our scope kind of flip out like that ignition sync is a no-no ok I think I think we're good everybody out of the way all right so we'll go in here we got to turn our lab scope on to accept a new clamp we're using I'm in 200 amp mode I'll go 200 amps we'll get all these all this stuff out of the way we'll leave that on 20 volts will turn channel C off and I think we are ready to rock alright so I'm going to crank this thing over we should see some something we should see some stuff now you want a nice you want to let the engine crank a little bit because you want that nice even pattern there you don't want your voltage fluctuating you don't want to grab the first part here where our engine initially turned over you want a nice steady pattern across here because that's gonna give you the best idea of what you're looking at so now if we go ahead and zoom in so for those of you who are who have looked at relative compression before this does not look normal what we're looking at here is a revolution of the engine right ignition event on cylinder 1 ignition event on cylinder 1 this is a full event and we're seeing 1 2 3 4 pulses in between right each of the cylinders drawing pressure on the ignition event I guess I should have logged out of that people keep trying to call me anyways ignition event to ignition event we are seeing Peaks but this is not not a known good look here's a here's a relative compression test on a 7 accord this is a 2.4 liter it's a little bit different 2.4 to 8 or whatever close honda four-cylinder this is a known good ignition event and right off the bat I want you guys to notice our scale here [Music] 266 we'll call it peak amps peak roughly half of that okay so we're reading half for peak amperage but the story really gets told once we zoom in here and shame on me I did not have an ignition sync on this vehicle I'm sorry but here's what known good looks like so we got to kind of ignore a little bit of the hash here we are just around the battery positive not the starter cable by itself but what we're looking for here is consistent peaks and valleys so cylinder coming up in compression cylinder leaving compression are being forced downwards next cylinder on compression being forced down next cylinder on compression okay that's what we're looking for on here which looks very different than this so this is my number one concern on this engine with a potential mechanical issue this does not look right now I'm not ready to sell an engine to this customer yet at this point and I think we have a mechanical issue I'm pretty sure I'm relatively sure but I want to go one step further first of all as a learning purpose for myself for you guys but also for the customer for peace of mind that way when I potentially sell an engine or something to the for this one you can feel good about it one test maybe not enough I want it I want to do at least two so I'm gonna go in cylinder we're gonna hook this guy up and we're gonna take a look so it's the same thing as a compression gauge would do we're gonna see the peak compression out of the cylinder but we're also gonna see is everything that happens between okay so let's go ahead and was my spark plug out of that hole the hole it was out of the hole the whole time sorry guys I think I told you that the spark plug was back in the hole there but it was not it's been out of this hole the whole time therefore I was just firing an ignition coil to the sidewall of the cylinder head which is bad news that is bad on me put your spark plugs back in when you're going to do relative compression this guy needs to be in the hole because we're not gonna build any compression on cylinder one without that guy in the hole if this was a good running engine with proper compression I maybe would have blown the coil out of the hole I don't know my fault on that one but let's go ahead thread in our hose here yeah we'll put our put our gauge on there now some vehicles when you unplug the ignition coil they will no longer and a signal to turn the coil on I think this one will we should still get a signal for coil on/off but I guess we'll see in a second all right so pressure transducers in there grab our test lead here and we're gonna pull I'm no longer gonna be looking at relative compression we're gonna look at individual cylinder compression now this is a great test anytime you're looking for a misfire anytime you're thinking you have a mechanical engine issue so do set up our scope for the proper probe we are using WPS range one and let's just do that a negative 22 to 200 all right let's see what we have wait for the scope to cycle back under the next screen key on and away we go again just capturing a decent sample size so we can look for discrepancies in the sample itself if we wanted to but all right first things first relative compression what is it why do we stick a gauge in the cylinder we want to see overall compression right that's the first thing that we would look at with this guy so let's look at that first with our scope bring our blue trace or our blue line down here and these big spikes are our peak compression and we are currently peaking at a whopping forty two point eight PSI roughly all right 40 psi 45 psi whatever doesn't matter this thing should have a lot more cranking compression 40 psi right doesn't sound right now for those of you that are used to looking at relative compress scuse me in cylinder pressure transducer testing you can probably already see an issue we have Peaks here right how many times does our piston travel upwards and downwards in the four-stroke cycle okay should be a pretty easy question suck squeeze bang blow compression coming up power going down exhaust coming up right we're pushing the exhaust gas out of the cylinder intake going down drawing the intake air into the cylinder and then we go back on compression going back up what do we see without even zooming in at this point in between our peak compression events 17 and 1/2 psi ok let's look at one total event that is a nasty nasty looking cylinder event so biggest takeaways here peak compression being low we have compression and what we're assuming to be the exhaust stroke so why would we have compression on the exhaust stroke the piston is coming up if the exhaust valve were not open we would have compression right it's basically another power stroke the intake valve is closed right it's supposed to be on the exhaust stroke but our exhaust valve should be open which connects our sealed container our cylinder to the exhaust system on the vehicle and it should relatively freely exhale that exhaust now if we have a plugged cat if we have a restricted exhaust if somebody backed this thing into a snowbank and filled the tailpipe up with snow a hard packed snow and ice in there we would have a restriction on our exhaust we could build pressure on there as well now I'm thinking that our problem is not a restriction in this engine because everything else everything else that's going on here now you guys are probably already talking about the ignition event but I want to get to that in a second okay so I'll get to the ignition event in a second what I want to talk about right now is the timing of this engine and how without even seeing ignition we probably already have a problem so what I'm doing is I'm putting cursors at zero degrees and 720 so a full to crank revolution one camera volution the engine is spinning over this is one full cycle and what we'll do we will throw some of these in here now every time our piston changes direction we are seeing with this line so before the zero line we're on compression here we're on power here we're going back up we're on exhaust and here we're going downwards on intake now for those of you who have a lot of experience looking at these let's put this line down at zero okay so that's zero psi and I'm going to count when our pressure crosses zero to our event our peak compression roughly changing there roughly what 101 degrees okay now let's do that again on the piston on the other side 35 degrees what does that mean so let's think about the way that the engine is functioning and the way we're reading pressure inside there our piston is coming up right we're building some pressure 45 psi we're building some pressure and building pressure as the Pistons traveling up takes some time right but we're not building a normal amount we should probably be over a hundred psi cranking on this engine now what's really interesting here is after the piston is at the top dead center and begins its travel back down words if our container our cylinder were truly sealed okay if our valves are closed our valve should be closed on the compression and power stroke right we're trying to send an explosion of force that piston downwards if we had a valve open we would have a severe issue now of course on insulin or pressure testing like this we're not having an ignition event inside of the cylinder okay not having an ignition event inside of the cylinder we should see the piston building pressure and then releasing pressure at the same amount of time that piston traveling up in the piston traveling down because we have no air loss in our sealed container our cylinder our sealed container should not have any air leakage so time to go up should be the same as time to go down if we look at this again we're at 35 degrees or 27 milliseconds on the way down or 75 milliseconds on the way up that's this side piston coming down is 1/3 of the total time that it took to build pressure so what is this telling us our pistons come up top dead center and on its way back down air has escaped or is leaving we're able to get back to 0 psi faster than we were to be able to build it this is a prime example of an issue with a valve being open there's a valve open that is allowing our air to build a little bit of pressure our cylinder coming up is able to overcome the amount of air that the valve can leak out but on our way back down when our piston is traveling downwards inside of the cylinder our piston would normally be reading at that same time that same time difference as it was on compression it's the air is getting out it's leaking it either into the intake or the exhaust it doesn't really matter at this point I don't really care cuz I think this thing needs an engine but we're leaking air somewhere now it could be into another cylinder potentially could be leaking somewhere but either way we have very different look ramp up compared to ramp down okay that's something really good to look at for valve leak issues for cylinder leakage issues between cylinders something like that watch that time of the ramp up versus the ramp down the other big thing here and you guys have been probably talking about it in the chat our ignition event what engine would there ever be an engine that when the coil turns off we create spark right so we'll set our first point there we'll set our second point top dead center is there as any engine out there that on cranking will fire the spark plug 122 degrees before top dead center we are firing the spark plug before we've even built compression inside of this cylinder we have a mechanical timing issue this is a no-brainer at this point this is the direction that I would have gone first of all when diagnosing this car relative compression in cylinder pressure transducer on this engine total time fifteen minutes maybe after verifying codes and live data that kind of stuff checking tsps fifteen minutes maybe to get this far and I mean I understand we're an hour and fifteen in but we've done a lot of other tests that we're probably unnecessary on this specific car but you can apply any of this to any vehicle that you're working on okay our exhaust it's building pressure on the exhaust stroke our ignition event is firing way too early and our compression stroke here is wonky on the on the power stroke afterwards it's quickly declining okay be careful okay great question how do we know the reluctor hasn't been damaged I think if the if the reluctor were damaged I think we might see a difference in our spark right our spark if it's being driven off of the crank sensor our spark would fire at a different time but reluctor damage is not going to change the mechanical timing of the engine we could pull spark completely away from this engine and we should see a known good breathing in cylinder pattern now it's possible we have a timing issue and a reluctor that's bad could be but more likely this chain is probably jumped on here and this is an interference motor when that chain jumped we probably damaged the valve train on here sorry somebody asked a question Oh question wasn't for you sorry I just yeah well there's your answer the only other thing on here that we do need to be careful of something on VVT engines that could throw you for a loop when you're looking relative or in cylinder be aware be very aware of a potential VVT issue variable valve timing issue changing your valve timing while cranking okay there's some engines that will change it by nature that's just what they do there's some engines that won't okay read your service information disconnect your cell annoyed if you have to if your cell annoyed were shorted to ground that would open it up as soon as oil pressure is supplied to that cell annoyed it would shift their cam which essentially changes the way the engine runs but that probably is only going to affect intake or exhaust and it's probably a small variation we wouldn't be seeing it as large as this huge huge variation this is telling a story and from here this customer is actually a guy that works here in the building this was his car and I went one step further just to be able to show him I went electronically proved all this out that this is what the problem I pulled the valve cover off this is a simple job valve cover not not difficult to do at all and here's what we find this is our exhaust camshaft this is where a roller should be that should look something similar to this right here okay this is intake cam but this should be on the exhaust side and as you can see it's m.i.a okay here's some sort of roller bearing of some kind again that's where we should have a roller and I was able to find half of the piece of that roller okay so this thing jumped I'm it's an interference motor as soon as we jumped I'm after a certain tooth or whatever count we've jumped time we smacked the exhaust valves into the Pistons and we broke components inside of this engine upon pulling the valve cover off I did find one of the timing chain guides sitting in there as well so this guy has a kind of two choices is it worth rebuilding probably not used engine or scrap heap maybe I mean not my decision it's a customer's decision at this point we've given them all of the necessary information to take this engine and have it properly diagnosed now it's 1222 it's 1222 I could pull this cover off and show you guys mechanically inside of this engine do you want to see that do you want to see the valve train in motion with the way that the piston is it's going to take less than five minutes to do do you want to see it I would be happy to do it all right I'm already getting a comment to pull it so I planned on doing this but I didn't plan on it being 20 after 12:00 already but I guess at the end of the day a good lesson is worth a little bit of extra time let me get all this out of the way and [Music] get this guy pulled off by the way if you guys have been on the fence about these this thing is freaking amazing I don't know I love this thing already it's fantastic tool if you've been on the fence wondering if you should get it pull the trigger on it it's it's awesome [Applause] now as you guys could see in the pictures there I have already had this valve cover off to prove this out but obviously it was all reinstalled for the class so this thing will come up pretty easy on here but a lot of times you'll have RTV or silicone at some corners in here so the cover might might be kind of stuck in place if you guys can maybe tell the engine oil is very dirty in here but which I thought was odd because the oil change sticker was from a week previous he had an oil change a week before this car was towed in kind of odd you guys don't don't have to donate don't don't donate Keith I love that you push for it I appreciate it but it's not not necessary we do this for you guys we do this for the good of learning all right be careful anytime you're using any sort of metal tools you don't want to go to the head you don't want to go to the valve cover just be smart about it I'm sure you guys many of you have removed many components on engines you don't want stuff falling in there you don't want to gouge any surfaces there goes one of the pieces all right so valve cover out of the way you guys can see inside of this wonderful looking engine and let's get this guy out of the way I'll zoom you guys in so you can see Oh number on this guy is a 25 54 - 20 on here this is the 3/8 stubby fantastic tool zoom in let's flip on a light really for 160 K on here I would have expected maybe it to be worse looking now that we're really close here getting real intimate you can see right here there's some some junk on there right there's some I don't know if it's metal or shavings or what it is but there's some stuff on that exhaust cam ok so we definitely have an issue there now let's let's do this let's pull that plug out of cylinder 4 all right and let's put in this guy anytime anytime you put anything into the cylinder to watch piston travel make sure it's long enough so it doesn't go falling in ok don't use a short extension if the piston is all the way at the top you're like yeah we're good to go and then you drop the piston all the way down to the bottom and it falls in that's a bad day so I think our piston is probably pretty close to the bottom there by the feel of it that extension went pretty far in there zooom you guys out a little bit now I'm gonna put some tape around this thing so you guys can see in case we lose the top here off the off the camera and actually let me bump that down as low as it'll go that way you guys can actually see the motion because this will probably end up off-camera as I spin this motor over by hand and we're gonna go by hand because I want this to happen very slowly oh one thing I forgot to mention now in the past we've talked a lot about cam cranked correlation right looking at the crank sensor looking at the cam sensor that would have been a good test on this engine you could have done that it would have been a good test to do in cylinder and relative compression led me to not have to perform that test okay so it's just one less test that you have to do but you could use that as a confirmation test on this vehicle if you haven't known good to compare it against your cam and crank signals are supposed to line up if they don't you have an issue and that's what we're gonna see on this engine here so we're gonna go through the wheel well and I'm gonna spin it over by hand let's go back under the hood you know I could use a new wire stripper so I appreciate that two dollars should should help with the new wire stripper thank you for that all right so we're on compression or we're on exhaust one of the too hard to say but our piston is coming up and right there it started going back down so on the downward descent our piston is coming down our exhaust valve might still be open so and right now it looks like it is looks to be to be pushing down in there but because our rollers are m.i.a we're not actually opening the valve so now we're bringing everybody down and now we're at the bottom so our piston is down at the bottom of its travel and we're about to start going back upwards right our piston is about to start traveling now watch our pistons going up if you guys can see I don't know if you can tell here's our lobe and our intake cam okay you see that you see that valve just open right there our valve just opened why would our intake valve be open on a piston traveling upwards event it makes absolutely no sense why would our our intake valve should not be open when our piston is travelling up there's never a condition where the intake where the where the piston is coming up either on compression or exhaust doesn't matter why would our valve be open and that is because we've jumped time so we get back up to the top of our travel and I believe that was probably compression because I don't know if you guys can tell our valve right here is about 180 off so I think our exhaust cam is gonna spin back around and we'll be back on our exhaust stroke but just by judging the internals here now let's go and let me one more time so now we're probably about to start the exhaust stroke and on our exhaust event here our valve is about to be opened but the problem is is our followers gone so we're not actually opening the valve all the way and we're back up at the top now what I'll do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to line up the harmonic balancer here and I'm gonna see how we're doing on time so if I'm going off the arrow on the balancer compared to the front cover here that should show about peak TDC and I believe that would be compression right because again look at our exhaust valve lobe it's it's 180 off right so if we spin this engine over once more they'll be pointed down so we should be peak compression peak td's TDC on compression and don't know how well we're gonna be able to sometimes the magnets too strong I don't know how well you guys are gonna be able to see this but if I come over here and we get up the camera let's switch over to this and maybe maybe just maybe we can get in here and um so I wish I could get you guys in here better I gotta get a small horoscope of some kind of stuff try to use use this thing it's too big to fit oh that's pretty good not too shabby all right so guess we use the test light here there's one timing mark and the other one is supposed to be right here and I know you guys probably cannot see it but our other timing mark on here is oh this is all the way over here okay so our intake is way off or are exhausted way off either way one of them is way out of time okay let me flip this back over we can switch over to the other camera so I don't make everybody sick great so is it worth pulling this thing apart putting a chain in it cam followers the whole works probably not this thing's probably going to either get a used motor or head over to the scrapyard okay fuel spark air compression efficiency is is huge here right is there also don't leave your breaker bar on the crank pulley if you go spinning this thing over somebody's gonna get hurt oh I did have these sitting here I wanted to just talk briefly real quick about this load testing if you don't have a test light if you have a lab scope that you can check current load test with a similar element a bulb like this maybe five or six amps maybe would be a good to use for something maybe like an ignition coil potentially that or in an injector or anything that's going to pull a decent amount of load smaller bulb like this maybe an amp amp and a half for a smaller amperage pull circuit we can use bulbs in place of other components and that's going to successfully load tests without using the actual component because maybe the component was failed but you want a load test the circuit still you can substitute loads blower motor right here you can substitute this for a blower motor and make sure that you can actually pull adequate amperage to make that component work voltage is great but voltage can flow through a circuit without having any current behind it okay so just keep that in mind that's why we don't do ohm testing on wires the little 9-volt battery and in my meter is gonna send out some a small trickle of voltage and it can go through one wire that it's just not a good not a good efficient test load testing or current testing whatever you want to call it whatever you want to do alright any questions yes Keith you write it is all about current watching current is the most efficient way to test in my opinion because it tells every part of the circuit current in one spot right here tells us everything we need to know about what's going on down here short of the secondary side of the circuit questions questions questions anything anything anybody needs to know anything anybody else wants to see well I have the cover off while I have everything out anything anybody obviously we didn't show every test Glenn's question can you explain to folks why a timing chain might jump that's a great question so this is stick shift car it's possible there was an over rev condition where it was dropped into the wrong gear that could cause a timing chain to jump simple wear and err as a chain has been on a vehicle for 160 K maybe it's stretched and after it stretches too far the tensioner can no longer take up the slack and then it has slack in the chain and we could jump that way um just inherent failure hydro locking a motor maybe there's a lot of reasons why most of the reasons a timing chain will jump is failure in design cheap chains that kind of thing or lack of maintenance are generally two of the reasons you don't change oil on your engine the engine likes to be lubricated right with fresh clean oil if you don't change your oil it can cause component where it can cause your chain to strech timing chains themselves really I don't know of a single engine off the top my head that has a timing chain replacement interval timing belts are a different story make sure you look at your maintenance interval for those but a timing belt does need to be replaced timing chains are intended to last the life of the vehicle but for those of you that have been dealing with the 3:6 in the GMS or the EcoBoost and the Fords or whatever other engines timing chains have become an issue we did the clasp right on the what was at the four liter right in the forerunner showing the timing chain stretch on that one so we are having timing chain issues oil is cheap insurance oil is the cheapest cheapest insurance I think money can buy this some mouse hopefully some anti-theft in the future yeah maybe I don't have a locksmith license so programming and cutting of keys is a little tricky sometimes on older stuff like this it might be possible newer stuff without a locksmith license it's hard to do key keep programming that kind of thing just a note if you guys are dealing with jump timing chains it's a good idea to replace the tensioners and the guides right away - there's a reason why that chain jumped reason wide stretch in the first place replace the components that go with it right can you see this problem coming you know Yousef you Yousef it's funny after I told the customer about this problem you know how we talked about the customer not always giving you every hint of information apparently in the past this car had a check engine light on for a p0 what was 341 I believe it was on this car peel 341 which sounds like a camera crank sensor code but on this car it's actually a timing correlation cam crank correlation code so chances are this thing ended up stretched or maybe he's jumped a single tooth or something like that out of time and the check engine light had been set he had pulled code somewhere but he was still driving the vehicle until it didn't drive anymore so chances are this one would have had a precursor we could have seen this coming but I never saw that problem it came in with no check engine light on so yeah all right I think that's gonna be it guys we've been here for a long time our in 40 minutes already I think this is a good little not little I guess but a good lesson on things to check when you're looking at a no crank no start fuel air spark compression for things that the engine needs and they all have to happen at the right time I have tables of tools here you don't need to always have the most expensive tools to diagnose cars okay you don't have to have a four-channel picot scope and the expensive amp clamps and all that stuff it's not necessary get yourself anything that's going to give you a lab scope even a graphing multimeter would be beneficial to you so tool up because it will save you time in the long run they pay for themselves this car was in a shop for a lot of you guys a lot of you guys who have been doing this for a long time in a shop chances are this was a dying in under 15 minutes and for those of you working flat rate you're getting paid an hour to diag that car you just made money but your tools would have helped you make money at this point right and that's what it's all about t-shirts up again guys with t-shirts we are working on it they will be here soon you guys are going to love them I absolutely love them there you're gonna be awesome when I get them we will do the t-shirt giveaway like before there's just me a little bit of a change to it and I'll explain that once we actually get the shirts but they are sweet sweet shirts and we will we will get them as soon as possible all right tool up yes James tool up and train up exactly use the resources out on YouTube there's a lot of guys in the chatroom here that have a lot of experience guys and girls who have a lot of experience in the industry okay use these resources these most of these are free free training you don't have to go spending hundreds of dollars to attend events if you can't afford it free training like our training here or whatever it's available just make sure you find people that are good offer good real proof and information no pockets on the shirts okay I think that's gonna be it please if you guys like this please give us a thumbs up please subscribe click on that little bell icon that I don't know if I if I weren't the channel owner there probably be a bell on here somewhere but you just click on that Bell icon that way when we come up with new content you get notified that we have something new out whether it's a live training or it is a new video that's coming out I probably have a new one coming out in a couple weeks here and we're going live again after vision vision in Kansas City in a couple weeks I'll be there if you want to meet up just shoot me out an email it's below in the description of the video here my email is down there if you're looking for tooling there's a couple links to different tools different tool resources Pico Milwaukee AES WAV all great great tools other than that hit me up if you want to reach if you want to get together at vision otherwise I'll see whoever is going to be there in Kansas City in a couple weeks otherwise we'll see the rest of you guys on March 7th 11:00 a.m. we are going to tackle something else that's fun and hopefully not an hour and 45 minutes worth on that one you might be a little shorter we'll see alright transmission electronic failure that's a good topic I do want to cover it at some point but as you can see we always use real-world examples in our training so I don't want to fabricate a transmission failure but if I do get an electronic failure and I will uh I will cover it in a video of some kind so alright thank you everyone for watching and we'll see you again next time in the NGK Tech garage thank you you

Channel: GoTech

Views: 228,674

Keywords: training, train, tech, mechanic, help, start, no, dead, fault, issue, car, truck, van, suv, engine, turns, sputters, stall, misfire, code, diag, diagnose, problem, ford, chevy, dodge, chrysler, audi, vw, porsche, toyota, honda, camry, accord, fusion, f150, ram, silverado, grandprix

Id: 3RbxKYfYIfI

Length: 120min 7sec (7207 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 07 2019