RonJ, you are correct. The spark was orange. It could carry quite an arc from the plug to an exhaust manifold bolt, but whether it was localized to the plug or against a manifold bolt it was orange on all 4 plugs.

 

It's probably a failing coil in the distributor. Here's how to test:

 

Great news for my Civic. I changed the plugs and wires and the car started up. Spark looked much improved over the original orange color. I did measure the resisitance of the TEC coil as you suggested and the resistance for the primary was .9 Ohm and secondary was 16.6KOhm. I figure the coil is on its way out and new plugs/wires were just enough to give it a boost enough to start. Either way, it looks like we have found the problem. The new distributor will be here tomorow. A huge THANKS to everyone who helped out!!!

 

You decided to replace the entire distributor? Your results clearly point to a bad coil, which when replaced should solve the problem for substantially less money.

 

Whoops late

 

whoops late

 

Way cheaper actually you can do icu and coil cheaper than whole distributor . I got 3 coils and 4 icu from trouble shooting . 2 main relayy two ecus three throttle body . Two distributor housings. and tone of other stuff donated

 

The whole thing was only $140 which seemed fair enough for the entire unit. Unforunatly i know you get what you pay for so I'm prepared to use the "lifetime warranty", changing the unit for the rest of my life. I do have a question about timing though. Does timing matter on this engine? My old truck has #'s on the crank pulley but this only has colors on the crank pulley. Using a timing light it is set a little closer to the white line than the red line. It runs fine. Does this matter?

 

Yes..

 

To set timing, warm up the engine, stop it, jumper the ECU test connector (the same one used to read out "blink" codes) and restart. The CEL should stay on steady. If it is blinking out codes, resolve the codes first. Time to the center mark in the group of 3, which I think is the red one. That mark is 10 degrees BTDC. The single mark is zero TDC.