1990 Civic D15 DPFI, Car was running proper, Had a plug wire come off the cap caused a miss, then there was a no fire condition. The coil is firing into the cap, but there is no fire coming from the cap to the plugs. I checked for continuity in the cap and discovered the button that contacts the coil has no continuity in it. It looks like some kind of resistor. Am I correct in assuming I need the resistor in there and it isn't just supposed to be a straight connection?

 

Take the cap off and hold a grounded test wire near the coil output then crank. The sparks should be able to jump more than 1/2 inch. If there are only weak yellow sparks that jump about 1/8 inch, the coil is blown. This is very common when it fires into an open circuit such as having a wire off.

 

I already tested that. It has plenty of bright blue/white spark from the coil. I had never seen an arrestor of any sort in a distributor cap before. The cap, rotor, plugs, and wires are new with less than 400 miles on them. I had just never seen a resistor in a cap before. It has infinite ohms and won't transmit spark from the coil out to the plug wires.

 

i got one for you also
a friend of mine got a non running crv a few months ago
and we struggled a while to find out what was wrong with it
untill we plugged in 4 of those spark plug test lights
and saw that all 4 were firing at the same time

the cap was arching and firing at all four
we changed the cap and fixed the problem
but still

how could that happen theres 4 points that are no where close to eachother haha
and somehow thay all got the spark at once