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I posted earlier about a sudden no start condition after some routine maintenance, including rustling around under the console replacing the shift position light. I bought a spark tester and found plenty of spark at the plugs so that ruled out the coil and I could smell fuel like crazy so no problem there. If I had spark it had to be a timing issue and my first suspect was the cam positioner Module next to the distributor. I put my multimeter to work and following ALLDATA.Com (a site well worth your $25, what can the dealer do for that?)found that it appeared dead. Pin 1 should read 0 ohms (mine read 33K) and pin 3 should pass power at battery voltage of 12V (or whatever you have), and mine hula'ed around 14V. So resistance was through the ceiling and voltage wasn't stable, hmmm.. I checked out a new one at the dealer and sure enough, 0 ohms. I was told, Test your old one off the car and "if you don't use the new one just bring it back". After hustling back from the dealer, and being $175 lighter for it, I went to fit a torx head to remove the top screw and it just spun off with light finger pressure. Ah, Ha, the dreaded ground fault! I just tightened it up and the MM revealed a good 0 ohm reading. Maybe just a loose connection and no relation to my messing around? I put enough of the running gear back together to get it to fire up and...no go. I remembered a previous post in my search on this board and decided to flop the pedal to the floor and crank it hard, keeping at it until the starter motor was running with the engine until I backed off on the key. It took about 30 seconds or so but it did sputter and then catch, running raggedly until it cleared out all my previous efforts at prodding it to life. Started right up the second time around. So it was a loose ground after all. I had just finished a site called autosite.com and they stated that 55% of all sensors returned are actually Ok and the victim of a misread condition, that being a loose ground. Well, new cap and rotor are in the works and this little project is a wrap. Buying a Beck Arney unit this time as the twice as expensive Bosch unit only lasted 30K. We'll see how long it lasts.
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Professionals have thumbs too.
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