In a scence you could say I gambled. I shot all the wiring that the manual showed all the way to the pcm , everything metered good. the only thing I questioned was weather or not the signal to provide spark was preasant at the ignitor from the pcm. you would need an oscope to see this. On the multimeter that signal would fluctuate when cranking. So after reading everything I could find I decided to throw an 80$ coil at it. Your not nosey, its great to learn as much as you can on these forums.

 

Thank you for your information.

 

You know, I always thought the coils where pretty robust by design. i mean all they really need to be is a wire winding, but I blew out my coil when I was doing a compression test and forgot to unplug the distributor. I initially thought it was the ICU(ignition module) since it is very sensitive, but it turned out to be the coil. I will have to go back and research some more and see how these things are designed. None the less I am happy to hear you got it figured out. Oh and I gambled on the ignition module first then the coil, since it all read correct for me too. That makes me wonder how much thought these technicians (editors) put into actually troubleshooting these types of failures.

 

I am wondering if it didn't go out because I had not changed the plugs in soo long. they were so bad the center portion was burned almost all the way back to the ceramic. The gap had to be twice as wide as it should be. just a theory.

 

oh yeah, thats hard on the ignition. it has to work so much harder to jump the spark.

 

Wider the gap on a spark plug, harder for a spark to cross the gap. If a spark can not jump the gap at a plug it will find next easiest point to jump. The result is called flash over I think, and we see carbon tracks as a result. Somewhere in the coil took the beating hte hardest, and stopped working, I assume.