Greenverbs

Hi everyone,

I've got quite the situation at hand.

I'll give you a rundown of the details and hopefully anyone can help me figure out what to do.

2001 AP1
106xxx

One morning, not even a mile away from my driveway, the powerband drops and the car starts to sound like a subaru while being sluggish and unresponsive. Took the car back to the house and ran a OBD2 code reader. Code came back as P0301, P0303 and P0300. CEL is on. Changed out the plugs and the coils. Coils came from buyautoparts.com. They are coils for a '05 s2k, which from a thread on coils here said that 04-05 coils were compatible to swap. After those change outs, the car still had the same problem. CEL still on. So I drove it to the nearest Firestone, not even a mile away. Had them take it in and do a diag on it. Compression came back good, coils 1 and 2 are good, cylinder 3 has no spark and the coil pack in cylinder 4 started to smoke and burned out.

The battery was relocated to the trunk before I got the car and it has only one ground to the taillight bracket. The mechanic told me that it needs a ground to the engine bay, engine and to the starter. I have had the car since 2010 and have never had any electrical problems. Could the bad ground issues cause cylinder 3 to not spark? What could have caused the coil pack in cylinder 4 to blow? I know it could be from the coil pack being bad from the manufacturer but I haven't been able to test with an OEM one yet. The OEM coil pack in that cylinder (3) was burnt before I replaced it and the one in 4 was just fine. What does that say about the wiring to that cylinder? What does that say about the grounding of the car?

I have no idea where to start or what steps to take next and I miss the F*&K outta my s2k. Not to mention it's putting a huge damper on my life since I am now having to drive the family car.

Thanks to all.

zeroptzero

Have you checked the spark plugs ?, if the plugs back out from being loose they will burn the coils. I would check the plugs first on the affected cylinders, and see if they are loose, but you are probably due for all new plugs either way and it might be a good time to replace them. Make sure they are torqued to spec, there was a loose plug TSB on early ap1's.

Not sure about the electrical part of your question, but I doubt a bad ground would cause the issues you described, but I do subscribe to the thought that more grounding is always good.

Greenverbs

Thanks JFusion but if you read in the original post I said I changed out the plugs already. I will let the shop know about that TSB and have them torque the plugs to spec.

team510

I would check to see if your getting power at the connector for coil 3. It sounds like maybe you had a spike in the system and without the ground it had no where to transfer the power so it fried coils 3 and 4? Just a guess because it's not too often that you have 2 coils go bad at the same time