RacingL88

Hello all,

I'm a new user to the forum, and have a question regarding an issue with my girlfriend's car. It is a 1993 Civic EX 1.6L, Automatic.

We bought the car from a friend earlier this year, and it is my girlfriend's first car so naturally its not in fantastic shape. It has 195k on the engine, 225k on the body ( original owner had something let go on the first engine very early, no paperwork to tell me exactly what it was ). The car did not come with much in the form of service records; Our friend was the 3rd owner and either didn't keep the records of the first 2 owners, or didnt have them, and also didn't do a good job of keeping track of her own service records. Therefore, I unfortunately lack a fair bit of knowledge that would be fairly useful.

A short time ago it died in the driveway one day, and wouldn't start again. It would crank, and was getting fuel, but no spark. I diagnosed the problem as a bad ignition coil, which I replaced. Along with the coil I replaced the rotor, dist cap, plug wires and spark plugs. The rotor appeared worn, as did the plugs, and 2 terminals on the cap and the 2 corresponding plug wires had somehow gotten moisture inside and corroded. The car started, and ran fine for the next few weeks until recently.

In the last week it has died twice while running at idle, but restarted almost immediately both times. Today, it again died in the driveway; After making sure the main relay was working and the engine was getting fuel, I took the cap off to check and make sure nothing I had replaced had come loose ( like the wires on the ign. coil for instance ). Everything was tight, and I put the cap back on. This time it started and ran for about 15 seconds before dieing again. I checked for spark at the plugs, got nothing.

Some other observations; Battery voltage is good, reads a 12.6V charge before I cranked the engine, and I put the battery charger on it while I continued testing.

Camshaft is rotating and timing lines do align correctly.

Turn ignition switch to ON, CEL does go on, then off and the fuel pump does prime. Additionally I removed spark plugs and cranked briefly, and could smell the fuel being dumped into the cylinders

I'm at a bit of a loss as to what to check next, and was hoping someone here could give me a little bit of direction. Any help would be very appreciated.

- James

GringoZX

Did you check the Ignition Control Module(ICM) in the distributor? Those will sometimes give an intermittent issue before failing completely.

RacingL88

Hello again, sorry for the long delay in postings. Still having problems with the car. I did remove the ICM and took it to my local autozone and asked them to bench test it; indicating it need to be replaced, I bought and installed a new ICM. I also went ahead and physically checked the main relay, and repaired 3 cracked solder joints. Unfortunately neither of these things have solved the core problem. I'm not sure what else could be causing it. Any ideas??

egcivicsi92

Maybe bad ignition switch