Coil pack getting hot and not firing!

**joedr** · Jan 26, 2009, 05:32 AM

All,

I am running a situation that after some troubleshooting, I have not been able to figure out what may be causing my problem.

My car was under mechanical work only: New TBE, new turbo and new LICP. The car was down for around 3 weeks and I used a battery maintainer to ensure that the battery was not drained.

Yesterday, after receiving the remainder of parts, my car fired up with apparently two cylinders and went ahead to look for bad connections, etc. I found that the coil pack (1,4) was very very hot for just 5 seconds the car was on. The other coil was at ambient temp. I decided to unplug the 1,4 coil and start the car again. The car was running the same as with both coils plugged. So, that is how I concluded something is messed up with cylinders 1/4.

I had another friend with an Evo and decided to try my coil packs on his Evo. The car fired up and idled/ran fine. I discard that the coils are causing the problem.

I checked the connections at the coils and I am getting around +12 VDC and good ground on pins 1, 2 on both connectors. The car was running fine before the machanical intervention.

I suspect that maybe there is something messed up with the ECU as the wiring seems to be fine. Any way to test further to narrow down what may be causing the problem? I am locating anothe ECU to test and in the meantime, I decided to start this thread for pointers and/or hints on how to find the root cause of this situation.

Thanks in advanced!

MalibuJack · Jan 26, 2009, 10:07 AM

Anything patched into one of the coil driver lines to get RPM?

Anything other than the ECU hooked up inline? (ECU+, UTEC, HKS DLI2?)

Its possible there is a corrupt rom image, or not quite the right one for the car..

**joedr** · Jan 26, 2009, 11:12 AM

Anything patched into one of the coil driver lines to get RPM? Well, the Blitz iColor is patched to the ECU to get speed and RPM. However, it was connected for more than a year without problems.

Nothing is hooked to the coil pack wiring.

Anything other than the ECU hooked up inline? (ECU+, UTEC, HKS DLI2?) No. I used to have a DLI2 but I remove it and drove the car w/o it before stopping the car for the upgrade.

Its possible there is a corrupt rom image, or not quite the right one for the car. I did placed an OEM rom (Rev 15) to the ECU and was behaving the same. Is there a way to force ECUFlash to write the whole bin one more time instead of the changes between the one in the ECU and the bin?

Mine is a IX and I have been using Tephra Mod since it was a beta and nothing like this ever happened. I am inclining to think that the ECU is bad. Can I just swap an ECU to the car and flash it with my immobilizer? I have a friend that has one and should be able to test that tomorrow.

Thanks for the help in advanced!

JohnBradley · Jan 26, 2009, 07:30 PM

So Joed,

It doesnt have the COP on it anymore? I am wondering if you damaged an ignition driver in the ECU at some point with the 1G transistor/COP design at the time? My car will run that way if I disconnect the MSD and jumper it the transistor pack and solely on the transistor pack. I hook it back up and its fine, but thats the only thing I have seen come close to this as far as issues.

You are correct about disabling the immobilizer and testing the ECU/Ignition with the other ECU.

**joedr** · Jan 26, 2009, 07:55 PM

Hi JB!

I did swap out the COP until I get the CDI box (Due end of this month). Ignitor itself was not working well on that setup.

On that note, the car worked after that swap for about a week or so! I even stopped the car for the red swap and everything was good til now.

I am assuming that the ECU got messed up somehow. I just can not figure out how. The only different thing I did this time was to plug a battery maintainer to not let the battery to die. Not sure if that could have damaged the ignition driver if I never crank the car with that plugged in.

I have a buddy that will bring a good known ECU to test tomorrow. We will see how it goes!

Thanks for the insight!

MalibuJack · Jan 26, 2009, 08:33 PM

This may sound a bit weird, but I had a weird issue but somewhat similar to what you were describing.. It turned out that one of my fuel injector clips was broken and causing almost identical symptoms to what your describing because the injector was not seated properly and causing one cylinder to run lean (who knows what sort of damage it did when I was driving it home)

**joedr** · Jan 27, 2009, 07:52 PM

It turns out to be the ECU. Just plugged in a known good one and everything was good again.

If anyone have a spare IX ECU, please PM me.