Weird misfire, wont run right

[justinf89]

I need some real help from you guys. Yesterday when i was sitting at a light, it felt like i lost half of the cylinders and the check engine light started blinking. It would barely run and drive. The code is random multiple misfires. Today, I've checked the distributor, wires, plugs. I've pulled each wire from the distributor to see which one if any changed the sound of the motor. The only one that was weird was the #1 wire. All the rest made the motor much worse when pulled but the #1 made it BETTER. When i plugged the #1 back into the distributor cap it started knocking again. What does this mean? I pulled the plug and it looks normal, and fires on a ground outside the motor.

I need to know what to do next. Why would the motor start knocking as soon as I put the #1 wire back onto the distributor? I can put up a sound file if necessary. Its the weirdest thing I've seen.

I've checked spark from the coil and its fine also.

Please help, right now we only have 1 vehicle for a family of 4 drivers/workers. Not good.

[redfury]

it's the coil. It may look fine, but if you check the coil with a multimeter, it'll fail the test.

The test is as follows. One lead connected to the primary ( the big coil wire ), then touch with connector pins one at a time with the other lead of the multimeter ( set to check for continuity /OHMS ) The needle or display should show NO activity. There should be no connection between the pins and the coil wire. IF there is, the coil has a minor or major short and is going to throw off everything.

Had the exact same thing happen on my way home driving...light blinking, it would calm down if I let off the gas, but as soon as I gave it more pedal, light starts blinking and misfires aplenty. The extra load on the spark plugs creates more of a load on the coil to jump that spark, which is what causes it to misfire. At idle, the load on the coil is light, it can jump the spark plug gap easily, which is why it seems to be okay.

[justinf89]

Ok well the primary of the coil to each of the connections is 12k ohms. I'll go ahead and change it since it's under warranty. I checked the compression in cylinder #1 and it has 165. Surprising at 250k miles. At least it's not a problem with the motor.

[redfury]

In my case, I hooked up my blue tooth scanner for my phone and it was showing misfires on 4 and 1, but when I looked at it by clamping on my timing light, all my cylinders were rock steady. Interestingly, a day or two later, the van wouldn't start at all and I got a nice backfire. That's when I had the ignition module checked, replaced the old dizzy cap and rotor with a good brass contact style and then found the coil was bad.

[justinf89]

Well it turned out to be the cap. A new cap took care of it and a new coil did not. love the easy fixes, thanks guys.

[Leeann_93]

The 4.3 is pretty picky about caps; the late '95 + 4.3 is massively picky about caps. Something about the flat cap design that makes them hard to reproduce correctly; only AC Delco has performed consistently and for a decent amount of time for me.