Help us help you. By posting the year, make, model and engine near the beginning of your help request, followed by the symptoms (no start, high idle, misfire etc.) Along with any prevalent Diagnostic Trouble Codes, aka DTCs, other forum members will be able to help you get to a solution more quickly and easily!
So I’m trying to help a friend out with their Honda and it has a no start condition. It cranks strong, and doesn’t have any indication of timing belt slippage or compression issues. I’ve checked fuel pressure at the rail and after a few seconds of cranking it, the cylinders are obviously flooded with fuel, so it is an assumption that injector pulse is fine.
My next route of inquiry was spark, and why it is not firing. I checked spark at the plug wire, nothing. I checked spark at the coil, nothing. At this point in time I don’t have a lab scope to pin out the crank/tdc sensors, and so after a few days of frustration, my decision was that if I was going to check the magnets on the sensors, I might as well replace them given the amount of work needed to get to them. Side note: they had the vehicle towed to my gravel driveway, and not the shop I work at.
Replaced the crank sensor, and still nothing. No codes.
Apparently this particular distributor is a hitachi one-off, and so the secondary winding of the coil does not list a positive or negative side; and so I’m not sure which side, if either, is supposed to pulse the ground circuit to ignite the coil and send spark through the ignition system.
Any other Honda I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with has had the terminals identified, as well as had All Data littered with proper wiring diagrams, and ignition testing procedures. Not for this motor.
I decided why not put on a distributor from a motor I know worked(5 years ago) one that I personally owned- still nothing.
I’m not one to usually throw parts at a vehicle but I’m at the point of pulling my hair out with the lack of information available for this specific distributor. Every other Honda I can find of this vintage has a secondary ignition coil away from the distributor that powers the secondary winding directly, not this motor.
I used to work on those old 4 cyl Hondas all the time, so I have a lot of experience with them. But it’s been a long time since I worked on one, probably 10 years, so I don’t remember everything exactly. I do remember that some had external coils, and some had them mounted inside the distributor, like yours. Finding the polarity of the coil primary terminals should be pretty simple, even without a wiring diagram. Just turn the key on, and see if either terminal has power. If one has power, the other should too if the primary winding is good. Then hook a test light to each terminal and see if either flashes while cranking. The one that flashes should be negative. If it doesn’t flash, the ICM inside the distributor is bad. From my memory, that’s how they usually failed.
Last edit: 3 years 2 months ago by Wolfman. Reason: Made a little error in my coil testing procedure
Honda distributor issues are common they used a couple of different designs I know single cam and twin cam engines are different but on Honda's always check the ignition relay first -- on some models it is two relays inside the same case.
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