By disconnecting the plug wire, you aren't isolating the problem like you think you are. Put it like this, if the shortest gap is what is between the coil tower & the grounded steel lamination, then the spark is going to try to jump that gap. By disconnecting the plug wires, you are ensuring that the shortest gap is at that location. If you wanted to test it, take a plug and connect it to the wire from the coil to the distributor, then ground the body of the plug and see if the spark now jumps across the plug instead of at the coil.

 

 

It seemed like a good idea late last night. :P

My train of thought was that if it's a sparkplug then removing it altogether from the equation would show me which one was causing it.

 

OK, so I got a replacement distributor cap + rotor, MAF, MAP, ignition coil and a few other parts, replaced all my old ones but it still won't start, loves that arc.

Tomorrow I'll be hauling off my tires and going in to replace the sparkplugs and wires. She's coughing like it's about to catch when I start it now, so that's huge to me, it means something I replaced, no doubt the cap and rotor, was in a sad state.

 

OK, when I yank the old wires off and pull the old plugs, will I be able to tell which wire is screwed and/or which plug is messed with a visual check (or resistance check on the wires) ?

Rained too hard today to get outside to do it.

 

Probably not just by looking at them.... possibly by a resistance check.... rule of thumb is 1,000 ohms per running inch. 40 inch wire = 40,000 ohms resistance. That's "old school" technology so don't expect exact results. Might want to avoid "yanking" them off if you intend on measuring resistance

 

Replaced MAF, MAP,ignition coil, sparkplug wires, plugs, distributor cap + rotor. No go.

Removed the wire from the ignition coil to the dist.cap, still arcing on the coil. Stops when I remove one of it's connectors.

I'm plum out of ideas...unless there's a bad ground somewhere I'm lost.

 

Did you read & comprehend what I wrote? Removing the wire from the coil to the cap does the exact same thing as disconnecting a wire from a plug... which does absolutely NOTHING to diagnose your problem. It ensures that the shortest gap is to the coil bracket... Did you try what I stated? If not, I'm not going to keep spending my time explaining things just to be ignored. I'm probably not the only one either.

 

That's what I did when I say I removed the wire, when I tried it it still arced across the ignition coil, absolutely ignoring the ground spark plug. Which is why I'm plum out of ideas.

 

Bleh...I'm totally overlooking something. I think I'll go to a junkyard and get a verified working whole distributor. Going to try the sparkplug grounding again also, with a different wire (have 3 of em). Put in new wires + plugs so it shouldn't be them now.