Lead spark timings are the same!?!?
 

Hi all,

Here's the lowdown:
The car is a 1988 GXL. A month ago I finished doing the Banjo fix to my PD, which was leaking. I decided that while I was in there, I'd try the pineapple sleeve inserts and some very minor smoothing of the LIM. (I didn't want to take the rest apart and have to spend hours removing yet another gasket). I also replaced all the vacuum lines and the spider while I was down there.

So I get it done and want to see if the car is any faster than my previous 0-60 of 7.6 seconds (with a g-tech). No! In fact I'm consistently in upper to middle 8.x territory! So I started troubleshooting. Last night I tried to check the spark timing. The weird thing is that L1 and L2 were occurring at the SAME TIME! T1 and T2 were not. I could not see a yellow mark anywhere near the L1/L2 timing. (Of course the pulley is a bit corroded, so the mark may be erased if it's not also a notch)

Sorry for the long explanation, but I thought it might help to know what areas I've messed around in.

Thanks in advance for any help!

It's supposed to be that way. Waste spark, baby :)

The leading coils fire at the same time, but the trailing do not. One spark is wasted. This was done to simplify the timing. There's some animations floating around here that show the spark timing, I'll look for one.


edit: found it.

http://www.rotaryengineillustrated.c...s/an-IGN4.html

Aaaahhh.... Gracias Strikland! I have another quick question though. My leading coils have three wires coming out. Two of them connect to something/yellow wires on the harness, and the third is a black wire which connects to nothing. Do you know if this is supposed to be a ground, or what?

Thanks again!

You got me. As far as I know, the assembly grounds through it's housing, the part that bolts on to the chassis. The wiring diagram shows a G/Y and a B/Y coming from the leading coil, the G/Y coming from pin V on the ECU and the B/Y talks to the main relay, and terminates at a condensor. Maybe it's the one that goes to the condensor (that's old- school speak for a capacitor, btw).

P.S.- You can download the FSM at www.iluvmyrx7.com

The black bullet connector goes to nothing. Its a diognostic test point/rpm tap. NEVER ground that connector, EVER.