SethAZ

Hi all. I just put in a brand new distributor cap and rotor in my 1997 Honda Civic LX and started the car. It ran for around 2 seconds and then quit. Turning the car over now, it simply will not start or run.

It was a Bosch distributor cap and rotor. I swapped parts back and forth between the new set and the old set, nothing. I went to O'Reillys and bought a whole new distributor cap and rotor set just to see if that was it, and nothing.

Is it possible that somehow the new distributor cap fried the distributor? The old cap is extremely old (I've never changed it in the 40,000 miles I've owned the car, which has 186,000 miles on it, and I'd be surprised if the previous owner did either). The contacts are quite badly scarred and burnt. Is it possible that suddenly having to pass the full spark juice through the new cap was too much for the 186,000 mile old distributor?

I'm thinking of taking a drive (wife's car) up to the salvage yard tomorrow and buying a used distributor. Anyone car to opine on whether that's probably the problem here?

If not, what else could I check? It's not the spark plug wires, which I just checked with an ohm meter and found to be just fine.

mx73lol

Something got effed. New cap and rotor would not fry the distributor. No corrosion on the contacts would mean less resistance. Less resistance means it's easier for the distributor to get spark to the plug. Double and triple check that you have the firing order correct on the distributor. Long wire goes on cylinder one, which is the cylinder farthest from the distributor. Start there.

SethAZ

I've quadruple-checked the firing order, but I'll find a different description or picture or diagram and make sure it's the same info I've been going on. Still, it wouldn't explain why it initially started up and ran for 2 seconds before dying.

I appreciate the comments and your help.

SethAZ

It was the distributor. I got one from a salvage yard today and installed it and it's running just fine now. In fact it seems to be running noticeably more smoothly than it was with the old distributor with its ancient cap with the scarred and burnt up contacts.

My theory is that enough spark was getting through with the old cap to run the car, but not as efficiently as it should, and not the full juice that it was designed to conduct. When I put the brand new cap/rotor in, suddenly the full juice was flowing through this 16-year old, 186,000 mile distributor again, and it couldn't take it.

Changing the cap and rotor was the second thing I've done trying to see if I could get some mileage back. I've been getting around 30 mpg consistently with this manual transmission, Civic LX, and a friend of mine tells me he gets 40 mpg in his that's one year younger than mine. He said another friend of his gets around 38 or 39 mpg.

The first thing I did was to pick up an intake hose with resonator from the salvage yard and put that in. A previous owner, presumably in an attempt to make the engine sound throatier, had deleted the resonator and cut off and taped over the tubes that went down from the intake into the resonator. Now my intake is back to stock.

Having gotten my intake back to stock, and replaced the distributor that was so on the edge that just replacing the cap fried it, and the ancient and gnarly old cap, I just poured a can of Sea Foam into the tank and filled it up and reset the trip odometer. Gonna keep an eye on the mileage over the next few tanks and see if any of it did me any good.