First thing I want to state, the car starts fine.

The thing is the car feels like it misses randomly at highway speed, sometimes it feels like a light missfire and other times its a heavy misfire. The second thing was that when I accelerate it seems like there is a big miss, sometimes its so severe it feels like I am hitting the rev limiter...but I know I am not.

Then one day I was driving down a back road and the engine died and it threw a check engine light. I was able to get it restarted after turning the key off and restarting the ECU.

Luckily I was able to get a code and I got code 15

Does this sound like a igniter? I do not get a code everytime and I have no tach so I can't see if its messing it up.

 

That's what it feels like, kinda like it is bucking and the tach needle is jumping up and down.

 

When I lost the igniter, the tach acted like normal. The engine just died on the freeway and wouldn't re-start. I thought the tach goes wacky when you have a bad ignition coil?

 

The tachometer can in fact mess up from a bad ignited. You must realize that there are multiple things that can fail on them. You can also test them, although positive results aren't always definitive. Until you check out the internal health of the engine, you are just pissing in the wind.

 

Code 15 is ignition output, you could try another known good working dizzy or buy another igniter.

 

Interesting, thanks I will have to start throwing some money away to save up for the igniter. Thanks.
Yeah I had that where it just died and wouldn't restart unless I turned the ignition off. Even then it would sometimes catch but stall immediately. Then when I started it I held the gas pedal about a quarter of the way down and it fired right up.
Right, the thing is that the bucking is intermittent. I can go days without bucking, bring it up higher in the RPM range and it be smooth. And other days it could be sputtering left and right. OF course this is the joys of daily driving a 21 year old car, and risks you sometimes have to take.

I don't have a tach so its even more of a gamble..
I wish I kept my original one instead of getting a lousy core charge from it...or atleast harvested it for parts.

 

I only drove my car every so often, I went years like that, before it stranded me on the side of the road. I had a spare ignitor in the glove box, I MacGyver'd it and used a Swiss Army knife keychain to swap them out. It's been like that ever since.

 

haha It actually almost stranded me today. Luckily I was in my driveway. I did get it started but I can tell when driving it that the sputtering and bucking is getting worse.

Also I was not getting any spark. Classic indication of an igniter.

 

Just an update, turned out the igniter had a loose conenction, replaced it anyways because of the cheap part already in there, I figured it would probably crap out soon enough.