No Spark Diagnosis (Honda) - EricTheCarGuy

hello and welcome to another episode of Eric Carr guy now I've been getting a lot of requests of I've put X Y and T on my car and it doesn't start what's wrong with it well the idea of the diagnosis video is try to put you in the direction and the mindset that throwing parts at your car because so-and-so put apart on their car and it fixed it that's what I'm trying to get you away from I'm trying to get you into let's find out what the problem is and then we will fix it today we're going to talk about the coil and igniter on a honda ignition system and how to diagnose the difference between the two a lot of people have asked me about replacing distributors on Honda's what I've seen mostly with Honda distributors is that they leak oil internally and when you take off the distributor cap would be a bunch of oil in there in that particular instance then yes the replacement of the distributor is warranted however it's very rare in my experience that the actual distributor will go bad it's more likely to be a coil or an igniter problem and you also want to determine where you're losing the spark whether you don't have spark of the plug so you don't have spark the coil all these things we'll cover for you today first we're going to start with checking the spark coming out of this spark plug wire itself with a no start condition okay step one in this ignition diagnosis step one would be to find out if you have spark at the spark plugs so what I use a handy little spark tester that I got at the auto parts store it looks like a spark plug you can connect to it like a spark plug but it has this little pigtail coming off of it to connect to ground you can just as easily take a long screwdriver stick it in the end of the plug like this and hold it close to an engine ground and look for a spark let's say I don't have spark there at the plug the next place I want to go is to the coil itself but these are the steps to follow first look at it at the spark plug that's at the end of the chain now we're going to follow it back to the ignition coil now in this car to get to the ignition coil we need to remove this I'm gonna look for that oil on the inside of this distributor cap but this one is dry so I'm not gonna worry about the actual distributor itself but if this were filled up with oil right now I'd be a little bit concerned this is the ignition coil and this is where it outputs into the cap so goes down into this part right here and spark is then delivered via the rotor to the rest of this it comes out from the rotor - right here and the rotor delivers it to each one of the cylinders as it spins around that's right here being the ignition rotor these are held on by a screw in the back there so this there's no better time to get this rotor off them now here we have a much better view of the inner workings of this distributor this is your ignition coil this that lives down here is the igniter this basically controls the primary circuitry on the ignition system and on an ignition system there's a primary and a secondary part the coil being the secondary in the primary being here think of this as a switch think of this is taking the place at points in an old distributor style setup but the coil is still the same and it has as you can see very clearly marked a negative and a positive so the next thing we're gonna check for is to see if we have spark coming out of the coil I use a special tool this thing is called a power probe and this supplies ground and power when I want to and it also tells me when there's ground and power it's a really nice tool it's probably about I don't know how much these things go for it but I think I paid like maybe a hundred bucks for this thing it's not necessary all you really need is a test light and test lights are really cheap but this is my really fancy expensive test light and you can use a regular test light and hook it up to in this case a Goodbody ground at the moment but the next thing we want to know is if there is spark at the coil itself when we crank the engine if there is spark at the coil and there is not spark at the wires then we have a problem with the cap and rotor replace the distributor cap and rotor it'll probably start right up one of the two is probably shorted either the cap has a short someplace in it or the rotor itself has a short someplace in it but that's what you want to do if you have spark at the coil right now the tests we're about to do but do not have spark at the spark plugs then you can pretty much discontinue your diagnosis there put a cap and rotor on it and it should run I'm gonna hold my tester on ground which that green light is gonna be on and hold it not too far away from the tip of that coil just to see if I have a spark coming out of it all right now showed it to you both ways if you have spark there you can see that it will easily jump the gap and if your test light is hooked to a ground you it will do the same thing and you'll be safe as long as you've got a path to ground as long as you know you were not the path to ground but we've established that okay at this point let's say hypothetically we do not have spark at the coil now we need to find out if the reason for this is because the igniter is not telling the coil to give a spark or if the coil itself is not capable of giving a spark my fancy test light is the best way to do this but you can do it with a regular test light and I'll show you what I mean okay now with this part of our testing what we're trying to establish is whether or not the igniter is switching the coil and what the igniter does is it switches the ground the negative side of the coil on off so if we don't see the negative side of the coil switching on and off then we know there's a problem with the igniter or some other part of the ignition circuit most common cost is the igniter but if we do see that the igniter is switching and causing our little light here to blink then we know that the coil is at fault so the igniter is telling the coil to fire but the coil can't do it I want to take my fancy test light and once again touch it to the negative side of this coil good turn the key on okay you see it turns red go and crank it crank it you notice when we plugged in the tester how in one instance the light was blinking and you could clearly see it in another instance it was not blinking if the light is blinking then that means the igniter is good if the light is not blinking then the igniter is bad and replace the igniter so that gives you some idea or some basis on how to go about diagnosing an ignition system at least to some intelligent degree to where you can say to yourself instead of putting a coil and igniter or just saying the heck with it and putting a whole distributor on it you at least can buy one part of the other now in my experience highly recommend using Honda parts whenever possible here Auto ignition systems are a little weird the stuff I found in the aftermarket may not work so well but it might get you down the road so some of its better than others I can't speak for everything but personally I can say that if I were to do it I would want to put hard honda parts on it if I could just an FYI I'd very much like to thank all of my subscribers this year here in 2009 which was the first year for a car guy and it seems to have been more of a success than I could have ever imagined and I could not have been without any of you so for that I am truly thankful so thank you all new subscribers and future subscribers for participating in the whole eric the car guy thing I'm here to help you that's that's my my entire purpose for being here and doing these videos is to help you save some money and possibly know a little bit more about those four wheels and get you down the road of new exciting things that I'm planning in 2010 like I said if car guy seems to be going somewhere so I'm gonna put some more into it more feedback I get from you about that the more I can give back to you but I just wanted to take a second to thank each and every person that's out there that is watching is about to watch or whatever and especially for subscribing it does mean a lot because this works out maybe this is all I'll do and if this is all I do then I could certainly do a lot more videos for you and possibly address some of those concerns that some of you have posted to me which I hope to make videos on in the not-too-distant future so thanks for posting those questions I have not forgotten about any of you and I will get to those things as as time arises such as we did here and as always you can visit me at Eric carga calm yay which also is gonna get some upgrades and new things in the not-too-distant future in fact I got a present for you was supposed to be here already but you know things happen well but anyway I'm working on it I'm thinking about you think about you right there sitting right but once again thanks a lot for watching Eric Carr guy stay nerdy and I will see you next year

Channel: EricTheCarGuy

Views: 1,132,313

Keywords: no start, ignition system, ignition system diagnosis, ignition diagnosis, car no start, auto no start, no spark, no spark diagnosis, cars, auto, car repair, auto repair, diy, do it yourself, do it yourself auto repair, diy car repair, EricTheCarGuy

Id: 9K78XIhhjAQ

Length: 9min 2sec (542 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 23 2009