SOLUTION: Coil packs were bad!

In May, got t-boned on the driver's side and our Rover was totaled. We've put a lot into it—I mean a lot—and I had literally just pulled out of a key smith with a newly cut key for our new second key fob from the UK when I was hit. Insurance gave us $4,000, we paid $900 to keep it as salvage and then paid $6,000 more out of pocket for the rest of the repairs. It involved the pillar frame, lower frame, two doors and rear axle, primarily.

After two months without the truck, we finally got it back. It was running a little rough, but not too bad. After driving it a couple days, the roughness was worse, and day 3, after starting it up and backing out of my steep driveway with my two kids in the back, it shook roughly seconds after startup and died as I was midway down my drive. It wouldn't start again, even after waiting an hour. Had to roll into the street and have it towed to a shop.

They claimed fuel pump and swapped it. Another $880... can't stand taking the truck to shops. Strange diagnosis but it did start again. They also checked an intermittent flickering low oil pressure light that was on at hod idle, and said my hot idle pressure was "below 5." Dang. I got it back last night from them and this morning, I dropped the oil pan and degreased and pressure washed it, the oil pickup tube and screen, replaced the oil pickup tube o-ring (previous mechanic had changed oil pan gasket but not replaced o-ring), reassembled all and put 20w50 oil (had been using 15w40), 1 quart of Lucas heavy duty oil stabilizer, and the longer Mobil 1 M1-301 oil filter on. Fired it up and even when it was hot, no oil pressure light at idle. Drove it around town, never a flicker of an oil pressure light. All right, I've borrowed some more time there!

Well, bad news is, my Hawkeye shows massive misfiring on Cylinder 3 [edited: not cylinder 4]. When I started it up, it threw over 100 misfires within a minute, sitting in park in my driveway. I did a test drive across town and ran a quick errand, and the misfiring was so bad at idle and stop lights, basically low rpms, that I was putting it in neutral and revving a little with my right foot and using the brake with my left foot anytime I slowed down. When I parked at the store and then started it up to leave again, super rough startup again, which smoothed out with driving. I mean, not a single misfire while driving, and I had the Hawkeye running the entire drive. But anytime I slowed down, it started getting rough again and misfiring.

I'm so frustrated. The almost-$10,000 to fix the damage from the wreck was a huge pill to swallow. Then getting it back and immediately losing $880 to a stupid fuel pump... and now it feels like the engine is about to die on us.

The biggest killer of it all is: It was running perfectly well before the wreck. No rough idling, nothing.

Any pointers on what direction to go with diagnosing this problem? I'm obviously going to try and conserve and not take it to another shop, but I'm also at a point in my life where I have so little time to work on it anymore.

 

Well anything could have happened. Pinched wire, broken connection, jarred internals? Did you buy it back from insurance? With that damage it might not be worth fixing. Need more details. Codes? Miles? Year?

 

Yeah, bought it back salvage from them and fixed it. It’s bacn on the same policy; Arkansas Farmer’s policy.

145,000 miles, 2004 SE. Codes are:
P0300 Misfire Detection Multiple Cylinders (Emission Relevant)
P0304 Misfire Cylinder 4 Maximum Value Exceeded. Fault Present and Static

Should I take it back to the body shop that did the insurance inspection and fixed the damage?

 

Well, a post on here after the accident I suspect would have netted a lot of "TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN" replies. Spending $900+6000+880+ further issues.........?
As a general rule of thumb, if the insurance company totals something out, you damn well don't want to spend more than the totaled amount to fix it. That's the reason they totaled it! I had a off-road vehicle get totaled, bought it back at a fraction and budget fixed it for 10% of the payout amount, I considered that a good deal, you're at over 100% of the payout. I figure you know this and it's a bummer of a situation but it's worth keeping in your mind as you consider moving forward.

Water under the bridge, perhaps good money after bad and more good money to come. I'd take a hard look at it now. If the vehicle is otherwise perfect besides this issue it's still not worth what you've into it except to a select few of us and perhaps yourself, that could be ok though.

At the very worst, hell just today I found a LR crashed with a supposedly perfectly good engine and he's willing to sell for whatever the highest offer is on "offer up". If I hadn't just bought a LS kit I might consider it myself.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you've better luck, you likely have an impact that caused a electrical related misfire. I'd be looking at my ignition system as it's the most sensitive to impact and then at the fuel deliver system, however since your issue seems to be regarding just one cylinder, I'd be looking at a compression/ignition problem rather than fuel, with the exception of an injector but that's unlikely.

I'd do some very simple swapping of components to rule out what I could without spending any money. I'd swap coil packs, ignition wires, spark plugs, anything I could, and see if I could get the problem to migrate from one cylinder to another. This of course demands your ignition wires can reach and of course, it also means you must swap BOTH sides of the wire so that you don't change the firing order. You could spend 20 bucks on amazon and order a endoscope usb camera for your cell phone/laptop and use its built in light to look down inside the spark plug hole and see if there is water inside, oil, anything alarming compared to how the other cylinders look. IMPORTANT, right now with the motor cold, I would remove each spark plug and carefully maintain the cylinder number they came from. I'd look for consistency in how the plug tip looks. One for example if it was very clean or very oily would say quite a bit about what is occurring. Hopefully they're all a light brown color and the cylinder that is misfiring looks the same as the others or just slightly more wet since it's failing to fire. If you remove the plug and turn the engine over for just a couple seconds you should see and smell raw fuel out of the spark plug hole, which would let you know you're at least getting fuel but don't do it any more than you need to and make sure that loose spark plug is not near the cylinder hole or able to conduct its power to anything metal or yourself! A couple seconds of cranking isn't going to put out a dangerous amount of fuel but I wouldn't do more then just a few seconds. You should see a spark from the spark plug and smell raw fuel (and hopefully not coolant lol), that rules a couple things out at least to a degree. There's a lot of things like this you can do for free to troubleshoot this issue. If you see a spark from the plug and you smell fuel in the cylinder, I'd move on to spending $14 bucks or so on a compression tester on amazon. Test all the cylinders through the spark plug hole with 3 seconds of cranking each with all plugs out and the fuses pulled for fuel and ignition. If you see equal pressure across all cylinders give or take 10% you're in pretty good shape on compression.

 

If you're open to trying a few things, I'm pretty confident the folks on here can nail down your issue. None of this is rocket science but it takes a little understanding of components and theory.

 

Thanks for the tips 05TurboS2K. Been at work all day today (still here) but on my drive to work and on my lunch I had two developments (no time obviously to do any serious troubleshooting):
1. On startup, huge misfires on cylinder 3 [edited: not cylinder 4] again, up to 40 misfires within the first minute, and then I put in neutral and revved a little and it went away. All the way to work, 10 minutes away, not a single misfire on all cylinders (Hawkeye plugged in the whole drive, and I monitored it). Even at red lights, where yesterday it was badly idling, no misfires. I couldn't believe it. I got 2 misfires in a minute after I pulled into work, sitting in park at hot idle, but that was it. Massively different than yesterday. Still feels a little rough, but nothing like the huge shaking yesterday. So I'm thinking, "Did something break loose or burn off in there?
2. At lunch, I ran out to the truck and cranked it with the Hawkeye plugged in to see what I could find. No start with about ten cranks... So now I KNOW I wasted $880 on that stupid imports specialist shop who replaced my entire fuel pump assembly unnecessarily. Never going back there, I'll be using my indy shop from now on, they do a real investigation. Anyway, that's a side note... I gave it a rest and then cranked it again, and it hesitated, stumbled, then started! And it ran pretty smoothly at idle for ten minutes, not super rough. When I sat in the driver's seat (I was inspecting the front) I could feel the roughness a little, but it wasn't terrible. I looked at the Hawkeye... Cylinder 7 misfiring 40 times in a minute!! No other cylinder had misfired once in ten minutes. But now Cylinder 7 was misfiring.

All right. Now I have some more clues. It's a migrating misfire. Cylinder 7 is acting the same way that Cylinder 3 [edited, not 4] was acting this morning and yesterday. I'm working on my
"differential diagnoses," but I'd love some tips if anyone has any for a migrating misfire like this. I'm seeing a lot of directions to go but none seem particular to a migrating misfire.

 

Head gasket leak would be adjacent cylinders, right? So like cylinder 3 and 5, or 3 and 1. Not 4 and 7, two cylinders away and on the opposite side, right?

Another possibility I visited was a coil pack. 4 and 7 are next to each other physically, but they're not actually on the same track, right? So probably not a coil pack?




Another report I read said an exhaust manifold leak had caused an O2 sensor wire to burn up, resulting in a cylinder misfire. I have a frayed right rear O2 sensor connection at where the sensor connects, but no signals saying it's bad. It does have some slight copper exposure on some of the frayed ends. I've noticed recently grease has gotten on the frayed wires a couple of times from greasing the front driveshaft that I installed last year from Lucky8. But... a bad O2 sensor can't cause misfires, right?

 

I highly doubt it's the 02 Sensors frayed wires but that's just my instinct based guess. I'd be expecting a code if that was it. In theory it could certainly contribute in a massive way by improperly feeding the ECU data which might lead to a more lean or more rich situation than should be occurring but still I don't think that'd be in in this case.

If I had to guess at this point I'd still be looking at an ignition problem, especially with how intermittent it is. Unfortunately I don't know this vehicle well because I've only driven it for 2 weeks when my engine block cracked. I'm wondering about the ignition packs still, specifically if you can simply switch them and plug everything in like for like and suddenly see cylinders 3 or 2 having the issue instead of 7 and 4 or something of that nature. If voltage supplied to the coil pack has been affected by impact, it's possible that the issue could migrate around a bit and that the wire in the worst of shape might be affected first, or something of that nature but again, really reaching for straws here.

No overheating, no fluids dripping that are new etc.? Given that it took an impact it's not unreasonable to imagine a gasket would be compromised but I'd still think it unlikely. An electrical part or bit of wiring though, that wouldn't shock me much at all.

 

When you're cranking and it wasn't starting, was it turning over perfectly fine just not actually starting? Or did it seem to be overcoming a bit of force, such as water in the cylinder that it was having to force out before it started. When my failure occurred, I had water in the cylinders and it was quite obvious that turning over was a harder than normal task for the starter. Just looking to re-affirm a bit. Intermittent fuel delivery usually equates to the motor half running and stumbling, the way an engine does just as it starts to run out of fuel. So when you came back after, it started perfect as it normally it would prior to the crash? Did you hear the fuel pump prime during the time that it was cranking and not starting? Likely didn't think to check for it since it was unexpected not to start.

I wouldn't think it's a head gasket with it being two different heads but there's some other shared water ports in the head etc., still that's again unlikely.

The fact that it's running rough and not getting codes, would really lead me to believe that you were getting issues even though the ECU wasn't detecting them. If your fuel system is just barely able to supply fuel, perhaps it could intermittently cause misfires due to lack of fuel. If this was the case though, I'd expect it to idle fine but struggle as you added throttle input. A photo of all the sparkplug tips would give quite a bit of information here if you could get a good photo of them. There's much to be learned from just glancing at them. I suspect you have the secondary air injection and thus getting to the plugs is harder, especially on the drivers side but the passenger side is easy at least, you could pull all of those and then pull just cylinder #7 from the drivers side. That'd give enough baseline data to compare the #4 and #7 to.

 

Was the fuse box replaced by the drivers side? You said you got hit there. I just had to work on mine for some starting issues. If the fuse box wasn’t replaced, the accident may have jacked it up and it will cause all kinds of electrical gremlins.

Also wanted to ask...are you losing coolant?