I was out for a drive tonight when I was at a stop light adn all of a sudden the car just died, all the idiot lights came on like the engine had just stalled. Confused I tried starting it, it cranked but the engine would not fire at all.

Hmph, must have flooded I thought. Conviently at this time, a cop pulls up behind me and offers to give me a push. He gives me the push using his patrol car, and I pop the clutch, and nothing. He then pushes me into a parking lot so I can check things out.

Ive done the weber carb conversion to my gsl-se, and have my fuel pump positive wire connected to the positive terminal of my trailing ignition coil (turn key on fuel pump comes on) Anyway, I turn the key on and look my my fuel pressure gauge, no pressure. ****, I got a dead fuel pump I thought. SO I decided to run the fuel pump right to the battery, and bingo I had fuel pressure.

So that tells me right there I have no power to my coils. Wierd. So I rig up a wire straight from the battery and connect my coils and fuel pump, had some friends that had found me by now give me a push. Bam she starts right up. I drove home and proceeded to check out the wiring diagram. I checked all my fuses while I was in the parking lot, they were all good. (visually anyway, i'll check them with a ohm meter tomorrow)

Heres whats got me baffled though. In looking at the wiring diagram. I noticed that the same power source that goes to the coils also powers the positive terminal on the ignitors! So when I jury rigged that wire to the coils from the battery I unhooked the stock wires frm the coils to make sure there was no shorts or anything that I didnt want to force power through. But if i had no power to my coils, I should have had no power to my ignitors too! But it worked... Im looking at the wiring diagram right now trying to find an explanation.

If just one coil had no power that would make sence, it would just be an open, but BOTH of them had no power! So the ignitors have power but the coils dont, what the hell! Does anybody have an explantion for this, or had this problem before? Is the fuseable link or soemthing that isnt in the wiring diagram? Do the coils and ignitors get power from the same source like the manual says?

I need answers and fast, tomorrow is sunday, and I need to be at work on monday!

 

The only advice I can offer is to bypass the 20 year old wiring with a relay.

 

well what im thinking about doing now that I look at it, if I cant find out exactly what it is, i'll just jump the power from the positive terminal of the ignitors to the positive terminal coils.

 

Yes, a quick and cheap fix on that is to use a fog lights relay with a toggle switch to provide juice to both coils.

what other things fail when there is no juice to the coil?

ignition relay?

I think its a good time to upgrade to a 2nd gen fuse box (if you have not).

 

NOW im really stumped. I went out to the car today, and bot poitive wires to the coils had voltage!!!

ok thats wierd, but to make it even worse I went to the bank today. I shut the car off, and when I got back in I turned the key to start, and everything went dead. tried turning the key again and nothing worked. No headlights running lights or anything.

Now ive had this problem before, and usually all I had to do was disconnect the negative battery cable for a few second and re connect it and id be good to go. I did this three times and I could not bring the car back to life.

Frustrated, I unhooked the nagative battery cable then the positive one, reconnected the positive one and re connected the negative one. Turn the key and BAM she fires right up!

The car has 200K on it, and still has the origional battery cables. Im gonna order some new ones from mazdatrix, and start with that.

 

have you checked your fusible links? corroded?? loose connections??

 

I will do that tomorrow.

I ordered new battery cables today. Im going to add some grounds as im having a few other wierd electrical problems, that seem to be because of bad grounding.

I have moved the wiring harness slightly to accompany the new position of the coils, so I did a visual inspection of the wiring and didnt find anything rubbed through, so we will see.