I am having trouble getting my FD started. The issue is that my ign1a coils are not getting spark. I have exhausted my critical thinking skills and am looking for some input in case I missed anything.

My setup:
1/2 bridge port
550/2200 injectors
Davies Craig EWP
Brand new Rywire engine harness
Brand new IGN1A Coils and harness
Power FC


Timeline (this started six weeks ago):

Everything is working well. All four IGN1A coils have spark.

I swapped my 9 heat trailing plugs for some 10 heat ones. Unbeknownst to me, the 10s that I put in were non resistored and cooked the two IGN1A trailing coils. I lost spark on the trailing coils. Both leading coils still worked 100% and I was able to drive the car home. There was some smoke when I got home. The coil plug on the rear trailing coil had caught fire and melted. I shut the car off and disconnected the two fried trailing coils.

I replaced the two fried trailing coils and still had no spark. Both leading coils still worked.
I then plugged the leading coil connectors in to the new trailing coils and tested them. No spark.
I put the leading coil connectors back in to the leading coils and had spark on the leading coils again.
All of a sudden I lost spark on the leading coils too. No spark at all on any coils.
I checked all the wiring. It was all good.
I replaced the ECU with another PowerFC. I made sure that the PFC was set up for IGN1A coils. No spark at all.

I ordered new coils and a new Power FC to rule out the coils being bad or the ECU being bad.


Five weeks later (shipping took this long).

I plugged in the new coils and the new Power FC. I loaded my tune with IGN1A settings.
I now have spark on the rear trailing coil but no spark on the front trailing coil or both leading coils.
Plugged my old PowerFC back in and had the exact same result as with the new PowerFC (spark on rear trailing, no spark on front trailing or either leading)
Pulled the coils and swapped the plug from the rear trailing (the coil that has spark) and plugged it in to the other three coils. All coils fire individually with the plug from the rear trailing coil.
After about 1/2 an hour of testing the spark on the rear trailing stopped working. No spark at all on any coils.
Magically, after 2-3 hours of testing, spark on both leading coils and the front trailing coil came back but only temporarily. Lost all spark again after 2-3 minutes.


This weekend:
Pulled the IGN1A coil harness. Unwrapped everything and checked every wire. Everything looks good.
Checked every wire in the IGN1A harness for continuity with a multimeter. Every wire has good continuity.
I checked the body harness (ECU plug --> IGN1A harness connector) for continuity and it is all good.
I checked for a short to ground and nothing is shorted to ground.
I plugged the IGN1A harness in to the body harness and checked for continuity from the ECU connector to the coil connector. Every connector's trigger wire has good continuity and none are shorted to ground.
I have a solid 12V on all four coil connectors. While cranking, the voltage drops to ~10.5V.
The three centre pins of the IGN1A connector (all four) have good grounds.
I am getting an RPM signal on the tach and on the PowerFC's commander when cranking (CAS signal).
My primary injectors are both firing, which I confirmed with a noid light (CAS signal).
My PowerFC has power.
My engine harness is a brand new Rywire harness with less than 1000km on it. Good connection from the CAS to the ECU.


At this point I am stumped and cannot think of anything else to check. I can't figure this out. I'd appreciate any help or any suggestions. Thanks.




P.S.
There are no rotary shops that I can go to for help. The closest one is 1000km away. If there were one close by, I would have gone to them by now.
There are no other rotary powered FDs in my city. I am the only one (not a joke). I cannot swap parts with another owner's car.

 

Are your IGN1a's from a kit or did you make the setup yourself?

There's been some recent threads on problems with how the IGN1a's want to be grounded, especially with the Sakebomb kit and relocated batteries. I can't remember the details but I'd do some searching on that. @F1blueRx7 figured out a lot of that stuff, tagging him to chime in.

Dale

 

The kit was pre-made by Driftinjim. I did not make it myself. The coils have two grounds to the battery negative and one ground to the rotor housing.

I doubt that it's ground related. All grounds from the kit are exactly like they were when everything worked 100%.

 

That sounds like 2 of the 3 required grounds for these coils are done correctly. There should also be a separate ground/return for the TTL level coil triggers - this is typically the "sensor ground" on most ECUs.

 

Is the coil harness sleeved? Did you verify none of the wires inside are shorting together?

 

Interesting. The harness is the same design as the Sakebomb harness.

So, what you and Dale are saying is that Pin B (the ground pin on the IGN1A connector for the trigger) should be a separate ground and not be tied in to the IGN1A harness' rotor ground or battery negative ground, Yes?
If that is correct, then the IGN1A trigger pin should ground to pin 4D on the Power FC.

However, I still don't understand why everything was working perfectly before even with the grounds are they currently are.

 

Yes, the coil harness is sleeved. I unsleeved & unwrapped the entire coil harness and visually inspected each wire one-by-one. I also tested each wire for continuity (all good) and for a short to ground (no shorts to ground on the 12V+ or trigger. The other wires are grounds.)

 

Well, the Sakebomb harness doesn't follow the recommended wiring from the coil manufacturer and the instructions compound that issue. But it works well enough if you haven't re-located your battery that most people don't complain. But occasionally you'll see posts from someone that is melting coils left and right. And it's usually because they take that negative battery ground on the SBG harness and run it to the ground point on the drivers side strut tower when the negative battery terminal is no longer connected there. It's now grounded to the body in the bins/hatch.

The FD body is not good for grounding. You can't expect a ground that needs to go directly to the negative battery to find a path to it through the body.

I went through nearly exactly what you went through. My solution was to take a four gauge ground cable from the negative terminal and connect it to the SBG harness under the intake manifold. I also ran separate cyl head for the T and L R1 and R2 grounds directly to the knock sensor holes for R1 and R2 so they had the closest path back to the coil from the plug. And re-grounded all of the OEM grounds with four gauge welding cable similar to the DamianB howto here on the forum.

Basically whatever kit you bought, if they're not strictly following these instructions, or your car is different than what the instructions assume you're going to melt coils.

 

Sorry, something else to note as to how the coil fails before it melts and why this could be the issue.

If the coil exceeds it's duty cycle (>40% by improper grounding or other reason) it will fire for a little while, and then stop firing, if the duty cycle continues to exceed 40% it will overheat from about 120F to 185-250F, once it reaches this point it stinks, and it's producing smoke/pushing electrolyte out of the casing. You can check the resistance across pins E and D for resistance. A dead coil will have no continuity and a good coil should have some continuity. Apologies, I just went out to the shop and tested my good coils. A good coil will have have no continuity on pins D-E and bad coils will have very little resistance between the two.

 

The harness that I have has an extended ground to the battery. My battery is in the trunk but I had the leads on the IGN1A harness extended to meet the battery in the trunk. My 12V+ is connected directly to the battery positive, my 12V- is connected directly to the battery negative, and the second ground is connected to the rotor housing. I will have to rig up a third ground for the trigger and test a coil to see if that makes any difference.

However, those pictures that you posted look identical to what my two bad trailing coils look like. Both coils have the same swelling/ leaking fluid and the rear trailing coil's plug is brunt exactly like that one.

 

Good coil

Bad coil:

 

Do you have something from the Neg battery terminal connected to the engine itself?

 

No, I do not. The grounding in the car is just the standard FD grounding that all cars come with.

 

Whatever you do, don't replace the coil until you've corrected the grounding. The stock grounding system was sufficient for the stock ignition, barely when it was new. In the sticky on the 3rd gen forum is a link to some grounding strategies that I'd recommend you implement before you replace the coil. If you haven't done anything other then stock you're at a disadvantage over stock since the negative terminal went to the shock tower and then to the iron. Now the block has to use the body grounds only to get to the negative terminal of the battery. The EM harness isn't really designed to deal with grounding this way.

The other part being that your alternator is working, and putting out the correct voltage without any unregulated voltage spikes. I suspected this could be an issue as I bought an offbrand "eagle high amp alternator" which I went back to a stock alternator to rule out any issues there at the same time I fixed the ground wiring for the IGN1A.

 

DriftinJim's kit is a great kit and has the wiring set up properly, but I think Mike is on the right path with your grounds. Those coils are a lot pickier than the OEM coils and need better grounding due to the higher output.

Dale

 

Yep I spoke to Driftinjim about this specific issue he now asks people when they order the kit if they have relocated the battery and gives them additional guidance. Good guy for sure, wish I had ordered my kit from him instead of SBG, I'd be head 700 dollars in wasted money on coils.

 

DriftinJim is a good guy. We've been talking over pm for a while to try to get to the bottom of my coils not firing.

 

I ordered the stuff to make a big grounding kit. I also remembered that I have a small grounding kit from Rywire in one of my storage boxes that I'll use. I am going to redo the IGN1A harness and split the trigger grounds to attach directly on the rotor housings (L1 + T1 --> R1, L2 + T2 --> R2).

I should get a little oscilloscope in the mail tomorrow. I'll use that to see if the PFC is triggering the coils.

 

A little update. I redid the grounds on the FD and added two grounds to the coil harness (one the L1/T1 trigger and one for the L2/T2 trigger). I also checked the coils and they're good. Still no spark.

Next, I bought a little pocked oscilloscope from Amazon to see if the PFC is actually triggering the coils. This is where it gets weird. I am getting a consistent trigger from the PFC on both leading coils and both trailing coils.However, the trigger voltage is only ~1.4v. Now, someone correct me if I'm wrong but don't these coils need at least 5v to trigger?

 

I wish I could be more help here. The Shop manual refers to a special service tool for checking the ignition single going to the igniter(in a stock setup) on page G-23. I wish it referenced using a scope. Are you sure your wiring to the crank sensors is good and the crank sensors themselves are working?

 

I wish it were that simple too. They are good. The wiring is also good since I'm using a brand new engine harness. I am going to send my ECUs to Michael Gagne to get checked out.

This car has fought me every step of the way for the last 4.5 years. I fix it, drive it for 2-3 months, and then another problem comes up that takes 6+ months to figure out & fix. Maybe it's time to ditch the rotary, get rid of everything associated with it, and consider another option.

 

FD PFC rant here:
Based on my 20 years of rotary ownership, watching this forum + the PFC list, this seems to be a recurring theme with the PowerFC and trying to build what I would call an "OEM+" car keeping it as stock as possible while eliminating all the weak points and quriky sequential behavior without going non-sequential or single turbo. This was my goal with my second FD. S5 FC powered by an AP Engineering PFC I built in 2003, I bought my first FD in 2007, and my second FD last year. What I found was that the PowerFC is more expensive labor wise to manage now than it was 20 years ago. The PFC was awesome for a PnP ECU, but I don't think it is now. Lack of tuners, cost of bandaids and hacks to get around 30 year old technology, failing 30 year old electrical wiring/components(OEM and Apexi) and the cost of dyno time required to tune a PowerFC vs something that has robust data logging capability (six hours vs 45min-1hour with a competent tuner). I decided to cut my losses and liquidate the PowerFC when I looked at whats available now because I wanted to get the car on the track faster than waiting on the PowerFC issues to get ironed out/dyno tuned. It's always going to be more expensive to go this route, but if you consider the value vs frustration, I think it's worth it now. Not so much before, or maybe if you have a really low mile car that isn't suffering from the typical electrical gremlins (rare these days).

 

Dumb question but does the AEM setup still use the stock ignitor or is it bypassed?

Recently fought a bad ignitor, had no spark at all on a friend's FD.

Dale

 

Adaptronic has been peaking my interest lately. No shop within 1000km will touch a rotary around here so I'm on my own to figure it out and tune the car but I really like how many more features it has over the PFC. The only reason that I stuck with the PFC is because I learned to tune the car on that ECU. However, there have been many occasions where I whished that I could go through the ECU and trouble shoot.

For example, if I could have been able to manually trigger the coils through the PFC then I could have saved myself seven weeks of trouble shooting.

 

The stock ignitor is bypassed/removed. Four wires from the PFC directly to the coil trigger pins. Nothing in between.