Last week I took off my coils, cleaned up all the metals surfaces with a wire wheel and then added an extra ground from the base of the coil where it meets the chassis to the negative terminal on my battery. Well, just a few mins ago when leaving from work my car had a tough time starting. When it finally fired, my tach didnt move, so of course the coil was dead. Is this just a concidence or did the extra ground contribute to this?

 

Since the extra ground did nothing, then I doubt it is the problem.

If you cleaned the parts with a wire brush, you may have managed to get little bits of wire into the ignitor and are shorting it...Ask me how I know. Or maybe the harness just became unplugged, or the connectors were damaged during the removal or reinstall.

This whole ground thing is really beginning to annoy me...the grounding writeup I am doing will sure be interesting...

 

You didn't ground the single wire bullet connector. Did you? No, you wouldn't do that.

 

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He coulda done more and not mention it.

You need to get the meter out and remove the ECU plug and ring out the wires from the ECU to the Trail coil assy and while you do that make sure neither of them is shorted to ground. Also make sure the black/yellow wire that feeds the coil has battery voltage on it. It should since the Lead coil uses the same path and it works.

Adding a ground to the coils is not either good or bad. But once you realize the the ignitor gets it's ground from the coil assy base mating with the chassis then doing a extra ground is, well, close to silly???? Yes. Silly.

 

I dont the coil is dead after all, I think this is my problem, I found it while searching for similar problems:

"I'm betting that it could be your starter or battery.. I had a situation where I would start the car, the tach would work for a split second and then just die when I first fired up the car.. As it turns out, I had a bad starter.. the starter caused me to have slow cranking speed.. fast enough for the engine to crank and fire up, however, slow enough that the ECU would think the car didn't start and so cut firing on the trailing coil, which of course killed the tach... The ECU needs to see a min ammount of rpm when the car turns over.. I know this may seem a little far fetched, however I verified this by replacing the starter and then putting the old one back in..."