Thread: bad coils
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Old 01-22-2014, 03:12 PM
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oldtrucker oldtrucker is offline
BMW Mech (70's) Germany
 
Join Date: Jan 2014
Location: San Diego County
Posts: 131
Hi,
many components within the engine compartment are sensitive to temperature changes as mentioned before. However, the manufacturer designs, or have them designed and made, with these temperature changes in mind. There is always a temperature range involved.

I have a hard time to believe that a coil pack fouled on the shelf. The coils are sealed in a potting compound. Unless exposed to extreme heat, the potting compound will not deteriate and should be easy to inspect visually. If it is the same type of coil that was replaced, you can probably check them off.

Is the car acting the same way as it was with replaced coils?

A sparkplug can collaps under high pressure. This means that what used to be a strong spark, could now be a mere glowing. At this condition, it also changes its impedance to much lower values. That in turn can cause the coil to burn out, if not taken care of the problem.
Make sure your sparkplugs have been changed on schedule and that they are in fact the right type for your model.

With an OBDII vehicle it should show a code somewhere near the coil or ignition page.
However, the code could not be a direct result of a misfire, it could be triggered by something else.
It depends on how smart they made the firmware. For example: Several reading on an O2 sensor may indicate rapid changes in O2 content. If the firmware was smart, it would report a misfire.

The plug wires, if new or did they sit in the shelf for some time?

The rubber insulation can get porous by just lying around. The insulation factor would degrade, even though it may still have it's original resistance. In this case, you could have some of the energy meant to be at the spark plug electrode, lose before it reaches the plug.
This would typically happen at higher RPM / Load because the average voltage at the coil is higher.

To test the coils on the bench, you would need the electrical specification from Bosch and recreate a low voltage input pulse and measure the High voltage output pulse amplitude. WARNING! the output is at several thousand volts (15,000 - 35,000 Volt) with a good working coil.

Hope, I gave some new ideas.
Cheers,
Norbert
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Cheers,
Norbert
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