Today I replaced my radiator and some exhaust gaskets on my PGM-FI swapped D15 EF 1989 Honda civic. Got the rad and manifold in without worries.

My friend, who was helping me and who will remain nameless, had the great idea to start it with the down pipe off because it was funny. His “great” idea and my childish mindset let it happen with plug wires 4 and 2 disconnected, along with the O2 sensor. Surprisingly, it ran and we only noticed the disconnected wires after the fact.

After finishing installing the rest of the parts, and with everything hooked up. We went to start my sweet boy and and get a crank no start; check and found no spark. Our diagnosis is as follows:

• Cap and rotor are clean, and are dry
• coil tested good
• power to the distributor was good (all 7 wires showed power, it’s a round plug)
• coil had good power and ground.
• disconnecting the O2 sensor to force a baseline tune didn’t change anything, threw a code like it should.
• ecu seems to work; fuel primes, no trouble codes, etc.
• no blown fuses / wiring seems ok

Not 3 hours before the surgery, the car drove 90 miles without issue after sitting for almost a week. Another guess I have is something got wet while flushing the coolant that some ignition component didn’t like, but it ran for a second after that before dying. Other than that, I’m at a loss, it’s late, I’m taking a shower. My next move is to buy an ICM in the morning to see if that does something. Any tips on potential causes or ways to test my ICM are appreciated.

Update 1:
Thinking of the distributor connector, all of the pins shows the same battery voltage. I’d bet there’s a short somewhere from it getting wet or crushed. I’m gonna test this theory tomorrow.

Update 2:
new ICU didn’t do anything. I’d like to add I smell fuel and the plugs are wet, so I don’t believe the injectors to be at fault. At the plugs, there is no spark

 

The next thing is spark plugs, wires, injectors, ignitor

I read somewhere that if the ecu doesnt read injectors present it wont send spark.

 

I figured it out! Turns out the ignition coil itself was bad. I thought it was ok because it checked out with a multimeter, but the aforementioned buddy told me his research showed it was likely the cause. I went and got the last one in town and sure enough, it fired right up!