I drove my civic to work and it ran fine then i come out at lunch 4hrs later it cranks but wont turn over what could have happened???

 

Leave your headlights on by any chance? I know it sounds stupid but it happened to me the other day. Just throwing it out there.

As another idea, your alternator could have went. The car will run off the battery for quite a while before it finally won't start anymore.

 

he said it will crank but wont start so the battery is not dead if it was it wouldnt crank at all. You either lost spark or fuel which can be caused by a lot of things. one of the most common is the main relay. But i would try figuring out if it was spark or fuel first. Stick a screwdriver in the end of the spark plug wire and see if you have spark whhile someone cranks it. Do you hear the fuel pump priming when u turn the key on? this happened to mine and what had ended up happening was my rotor exploded as i was pulling into the stall and i didnt know until i restarted it. You could have also blown a headgasket and have too much water in the cylinders but u would have noticed white smoke coming out of it while driving

 

Hey guy did you check for spark if you dont have spark the engine wont fire up and if you dont have spark it might be the internal coil inside the distributor too check if you got spark i dont know if u know how too do it but here is how you do it take a sparkplug wire off the number 1 cylinder and take a screw driver and stick it in the end of the sparkplug boot and ground it too a bolt on the valvecover but make sure u are not touching the metal because youll get a nice shock so make sure your grounding the screwdriver and havesomeone go inside the car and crank it if you have no spark then you know its the coil try that first .If its got spark then check too see if you have fuel pressure going too the injectors if you have fuel then check the timming marks and see if everything is at tdc also when was the last time you changed the timming belt ????? Take the vlavecover off and inspect too see if maybe the timming belt failed ive ran into alot of cars where the customer says i was driving and then it shut off i have power too the gauges and and it cranks but it wont fireup so when I go check out what happend the cars timming belt has had 23 teeth missing off it so basically it wont let the car fire up how can it hello lol so just check those things its probably something stupid and easy too fix so try it out peace good Luck.

 

no i didnt leave anything on, i had my coworker try to jump me and it still wouldnt start then we tried push starting and that didnt work either. It sounds like its not getting spark but could a distrubuter go out overnight? brand new plug wires and 3 new spark plugs. 1 spark plug is stripped though and i couldnt replace it and it happened to be the number 1 cyl.

 

i have been blowing some white smoke but there doesnt apear to be any delution to the oil on the dipstick.

 

so when are you going to check for spark? probably the coil.

 

Check for spark and check for fuel. Then get back to us with wat you find out...

 

He actually said it would crank but not turn over which I figured meant the battery was too weak to turn the motor over. Just a misunderstanding.

Anyways, not sure on this one. It's weird that it would just suddenly go like that. My brothers DX hatchback just randomly crapped out one night and it turned out to be a bad distributor. I know the dizzy's are a common thing to go randomly on these cars so that would be my next guess.

 

Seriously, we could all do without your guessing.

 

Aren't we all basically taking "guesses" by telling him what we think it could be over the internet? Your obviously not going to be able to fix someones car unless it's in front of you. Just giving him some ideas to check out, thats all.

 

He wont let us know if he has spark or not for sure so we wont be able to help him anymore than has already been tried.