Hi Board,
Hopefully an expert here can help me, my 96 Golf 1.8 is driving me insane (and emptying my wallet!)
Here's the story. Over the winter the car has had problems starting in the morning. The battery is strong, but it sometimes took up to 3 or 4 minutes of cranking to get it to splutter into life. Once started, it was always fine for the rest of the day.
Possibly related, on two occasions (once after unavoidably driving through a big puddle, the second time when driving while it was raining horizontally) the engine cut out and took another few minutes of cranking to fire up again.
I replaced the HT leads and WD40'd everything, but this didn't help, so the car was at a local garage last week to try and fix this. The garage reckoned they had fixed the problem by replacing the distributor (not cheap!).
Since having the car back from the garage it still doesn't start straight up in the morning (but it is better than before), but now it has a bigger problem which is that it is misfiring and losing power when under load between 2000-3000rpm in all gears.
I've just replaced the spark plugs in case that was it, but it hasn't helped. The old ones only had 10k on them - and I'm not a spark plug expert but they looked an OK colour to me.
So now it's had new plugs, leads, dizzy, the only thing left electrical to change is the ignition coil. Before I lay down another 50 quid, does anyone think this is this likely to be the problem?
Something I now remember is that when we broke down after driving through the puddle, it was very dark outside and while cranking the engine I could see an orange spark inside the ignition coil (behind its black plastic cover). Is this normal or a sign of a duff coil?
Thanks for any help!
Mike
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Assumng the king lead is not open cct, that is the lead from the coil to the dizzy, then you have a breakdown in the coil, i.e. faulty. Repalce and away you go. Regards Peter
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Probably cracked coil around connection to main HT lead.Don`t Ht leads come in a set these days..Though I do know some garages only replace the lead that is thought to cause the problem.Supposedly to reduce your costs?
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Steve
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Yes, it's had a new "king lead", so I'll try a new coil.
If it's not that, I'm pushing it off a cliff!
Thanks!
Mike
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