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So I'm driving down one of my favorite mountains coming back from camping and the engine just dies, doesn't kick or anything, tach just falls and I lose my power steering and braking. This is all coming decently downhill on asphalt. Pull over and try to restart and it just turns over, won't fire. Roll it down to the bottom, call AAA and have it towed back to my house.

I don't seem to have any engine codes and I cleaned all my connections good, fluids are all okay, still no go. I check to see if the spark plugs are sparking and they aren't, well not quite, on rare occasion it's real faint. My dad and I check cam and crank sensors, they're fine. We check the coils, they're fine. Pick up a LED to see if the ignitor is triggering the coils, ran one from the outside pin of the 3-pin coil connector to the positive battery terminal. I turned over the engine and nothing happens to the LED.

So my questions, I got the 12V LED from radio shack and am presuming that it is responsive enough to at least faintly flash, agree? And if the LED is right, what are the odds that it's the ignitor and not something behind it, does anything have a history of being bad on our cars? Any other ideas?

Thanks for the help, tomorrow I'll be going out and trying to check more wiring and such.

Too bad you are on the other side of the country, I have extra ignigtors and coils.

Best of luck!

A 12V LED? Do you have a link to the part you're talking about? LEDs aren't usually "12-volt" devices. If you wanted to use an LED in this way you'd need to connect a resistor in series with it and make sure you got the polarity correct.

How did you check to see if the spark plugs are firing? If you just stuck a spare plug in the end of one of the plug wires, you also have to make sure the plug body is grounded (say, by resting it on the negative battery post).

Vikash, yes I am fully aware that most LEDs are not made for 12V, this little guy has a drop down resistor in one of the leads. Putting it across the terminals verifies that 12V lights it up.

To check the spark, I pulled the plug, popped it back into the spark plug wire, clamped the body to a good ground so that it would shake loose or anything while cranking and then my dad and I took turns sitting and cranking for a second while the other watched for a spark. It's not sparking properly.

And thanks for the offer Doug.

Could the little square transformer stuck in the middle of the firewall be faulty. I'm not sure but i think it's parts of the ignition system.

Lee - Hmm, and you had the polarity correct when you hooked it to the coil? That does sound like an okay way to check for a spark... you may just see the briefest flickers but you'll see something.

mhrallyteam - Yeah, that square doohickey is the ignitor. This could be a bad ignitor or maybe a bad cam or crank sensor.

Lee - No ECU trouble codes? How did you check the cam and crank sensors?

what happens to an 12V LED if you don't quite have 12V ????

I'd use a conventional incandescent 12V bulb for that test, one with low power requirements like a flashlight bulb, it shows a weak condition and still lights up some even with less than 12V

also static testing of coils can quickly spot a totally bad one, but not a weak one, which is very common. the resistances will be OK but it won't work worth a crap under load - my bet for your problem

Vikash - We definately had the correct polarity (I'm an AE and my dad is an EE...) and went with that method because that was what was recommended in my Hayne's manual. We weren't seeing anything at all...
As far as engine codes, I disconnected the test connector and turned the ignition to the on position and my check engine light just sits there on with my oil light, doesn't flash or anything. I'm not 100% sure I'm checking for the codes correctly, however to check the sensors all we did was run the wires back to a connector and cross-check the resistances with those listed in my Hayne's manual, I was within specs so we're assuming they are okay.

Prof - A 12V LED should still light a little bit even if it doesn't have 12V, the one I have is 50mcd so I'd expect to see atleast a little even with a lower voltage. My resistances on the static check were 8ohm on the primary and around 14k ohm on the secondary (I think that's what I was getting on the secondary). My coil pack does get wet and bog down sometimes if I've been doing a lot of water splashes but everything was good and dry when it died? If the ignitor isn't it I might try the find a used on to throw in real quick and see.

Thanks guys and I'm still open to suggestions.

The only time my car did that was when the stereo store drilled my ecu when they installed an alarm system. Car would turn over but not fire.

one guess would be somewhere along the lines of faulty ecu maybe?

Battery terminals really tight? Find a spare ignitor at a junk yard replace that? Try a diff coilpack?

You could also try a multimeter instead of a LED

To check for codes, connect the black connectors and turn the ignition on. The CEL will either flash out codes or just flash steadily if there are no codes.

Yeah, I'm guessing the "12V LED" is just an LED with a resistor sized appropriately to flow the right amount of current for the LED with 12 volts supplied. At less than 12 volts the LED would just be dimmer since the current flowing through it would be lower.

Try maybe unplugging the ignitor and hooking the LED across its "ground" and "trigger 1" pins. The ignitor connector pinouts are as follows (looking into the connector molded into the ignitor's body):

Dan - Battery terminals are definately tight and the junkyard's around here don't have any extras, I know, wtf?

Vikash - You are right about the LED, you can see the resistor in the lead under a little heat shrink. I'll go home tomorrow and do that and try to check the codes again, if you are talking about a black connector then I definately didn't have the right one, the one I was playing with was green. Which brings me to the question, do I need to keep that green one plugged or unplugged? I also test the ignitor more as you suggested.

On another note, is anyone willing to send me an ignitor and coil pack and exhange for some money, preferebly less than the $140 NAPA wanted?

Thanks.

Leave the green connector unplugged; it's used for test mode or for clearing codes:

http://www.surrealmirage.com/subaru/engine.html

I may have an ignitor and coil pack... let me look and get back to you. Ground would probably take a single day to get from McLean to Blacksburg.

Ah yes, I used to have that printed but had since lost/forgotten, thanks.

Thank you Vikash, just let me know what needs to be done if you have an ignitor and/or coil pack.

Ignitors are expensive arent they, i looked at replacing mine when my incident occured and i think they wanted 180 or something crazy when i was expecting maybe 5dollars tops.

I looked; I just have an ignitor but no coil pack. If you just pay shipping I can send it to you. Priority Mail is $3.85 and should take 2 days; Express Mail is $13.65 and should be overnight. (I checked -- ground shipping would still take 2 days). My PayPal address is my username here at cornell.edu.

But you might be better off PMing Blackbart... I seem to remember him offering Diamond coil packs for $25 shipped or some similar good price, and I'm sure he has an ignitor.

Dan - yeah, NAPA wanted 138, Carquest wanted 180, ouch...

Vikash - I sent a PM to Blackbart and am waiting a reply but if he doesn't have an ignitor I'll take you up on your gracious offer.

Thanks guys.

Edit : Blackbart has both that he's helping me out on, thanks though V.

Okay... So I went home today and started looking for this black connector that I still hadn't seen. I looked everywhere and couldn't find another connector that just connects a single wire to a single wire. What I did find was that there were multiple wires that had been worked on coming right out of the ECU. As in wires on multiple connectors were wrapped in gray electrical tape, not factory by anymeans, and looked like they'd been spliced perhaps. There were other wires in that general area that had been modified too.

Now this interests me a lot because when I tried to get Vikash's scan tool to work I never could. I tried multiple laptops and he even helped run a few checks to verify my laptop portal was working correctly.

So I was wondering if someone could verify the ignitor number, just to make sure I don't have some jury rigged setup or something. Mine has - J142 2504

Thanks.

That is kind of odd... Why would anyone be mucking with the ECU wires of an NA FWD?

Instead of using the black connectors, you could just directly ground the "read memory connector" pin of the ECU.

My 'new' ignitor and coil pack showed up today, thanks Blackbart, and went out to the house to swap them out. Well first thing I noticed is that the new one was an Hitachi and rectangular with pointy ends while the one I had was just a small square. The connector was the same so I figured no worries and put it on. Went to turn the car over, nothing. So I thought, perhaps it's the coil pack, nope, changed it out with no results. I also tried the new coilpack with the old ignitor.

I am going to find an ECU pinout diagram, know I've seen one around here, and try to find any breaks in the wires between the ignitor and ECU. Anybody have any other ideas?

Thanks

You can find the necessary wiring info in the manual Josh posted in the Stuff You Need to Know forum.

The different ignitors are electrically pretty much the same.

I got my read memory pin grounded and it showed no codes. So my dad and I decided to check one more time for spark, all the sudden we had it. Needless to say we were a bit confused.
So we pulled out all plugs to check them, this time we got nothing. So we removed the belt cover (I know, should have done so in the first place) and low and behold it wasn't turning. My belt had delaminated and finally broke on toothed layer but the outer was still intact. It'll be a little bit of a pain to get the new belt on with the crankpulley still on (old crank pulley torque problem fix) but my baby should be running soon.
And now I have a spare ignitor and coil pack, thanks Frank. It's been a bit of a run around to discover this but I've learned a fair bit... thanks all for the help.

glad you found the problem. the only timing belts I've broken on the road have been on older Hondas, interference engines where the problem is, ahem, a little more obvious.

Prof - yeah, yay for non-interference engines.

She's running again . The timing belt wasn't too bad, the hardest part was getting a pin into the tensioner. The outside hole facing away from the engine had been broken so but getting a ground down allen wrench through to the other side held it. I don't really know how you could get the timing off, the marks line up pretty easy and the marks on the belt are nice to make sure things are proper. Now that I have this old leaky engine running again I can start looking for a new one.