Weird 16v stuff, read on.

["Young, Patrick" <PYoung@netledger.com>]

Ok, so I got my new distributor, and put that in, the car now starts (Thanks
to Mike @ Adirondack for the excellent price on the 16v distributor!).

So, I moved it over in front of the garage, and went to have dinner,
thinking about why it sounded like a lawn-mower engine.

Come back, decide to fire it up, and pull a spark plug wire from each
cylinder, to see who's fine, and who's not.

Cylinders one and four were fine.  Yank a wire, car runs worse.  Cylinders
two and three?  Yank a wire, no change.  Hell, for fun, I yanked BOTH.  No
change.

Now, I did note some oil on the spark plug wire end in cylinders 2 and 3.
Shine a light and eyeball the access hole, and no oil showing - and no oil
on the spark end of the spark plug.

So, I pulled the wire from cylinder two, pulled the spark plug, plugged it
into the wire, and secured it so it had a good ground to the engine - and
where I could see it.  Spark did exist.  Same held true for cylinder three.
The spark was blue-ish.  Not bright blue like Bentley mentions, but just
plain blue.  I'm showing 12.3 volts at the battery when it's sitting, which
is slightly low (between 25 and 50% charged, according to the chart in the
Bentley) - but it DOES start.  I never seen it where you visually verify
spark on the spark plug for a given cylinder, but when installed, no spark
(obviously, otherwise, the engine would run differently, and change when I
yank the wire while the engine is running.)

Needless to say, I'm kinda stumped.  I know what the problem is, but I don't
quite know where I should start looking for a fix, so I thought I'd post my
sad tale to the list, and see if anyone else has had this problem (and how'd
ya fix it?).  I really can't set the timing until I solve this problem,
either - I got it close, but found my timing light is kaput, so while the
timing isn't perfect, it should be fairly close.

I'm hoping it as simple as new spark plug wires (never mind the sound of my
wallet wincing in pain.), but any other advice, hints, tips, etc,
appreciated.

(Didn't mean to ramble on, but I wasn't gonna spare the details, you never
know what helps.)

Thanks!
-Pat


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