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1g-fe Running Rough After Battery Replacement; - What I did, how I fixed it.
Topic Started: Mar 18 2012, 09:13 PM (465 Views)
kiwi_steve
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Well, my wife bought an Altezza a few years back when they were hellish expensive - but its been a stunningly reliable car - and one we've put close to 200k on (we lived out of town and did a lot of travelling). Its needed nothing more than oil changes, two bottom ball joints and a cambelt/idler/tensioner (and is due again now).

The latest thing to go on it was the battery - no suprise, the one it was imported with was shot and we were broke following its purchase, so it got the smallest cheapest battery we could find - and its lasted a good few years anyway. So I put a new one in recently - the biggest (and highest CCA) one I could find that would fit. Great, it starts again... but on its first start it ran like a bag of bumholes (are you allowed to say bumholes on the internet?).

I wasn't sure what was wrong, and at first I thought it might just be the loss of self-tuning data so left it a day - but it was running terribly. I pulled one of the plugs, and it almost had no electrode at all!... so I pulled them all... all the same. Factory original with 230ish-k on them... so I purchased a new set thinking that might be the problem... but no, absolutely no difference.

So, I though, maybe its a dirty throttle body - pulled it apart and cleaned it out - it had a ton of gunk in it... again, no change.

Next I tried pulling the plugs from each coil-pack. My reasoning was that if a pack had gone, pulling the plug to see which one made no difference would tell me if one was faulty... but pulling on made the car stop - any one, it didn't matter... so that didn't help at all. I couldn't help thinking it was a coil pack though - and I had read that 1G-FE coil packs were unreliable at times. But wreckers wanted $150 for one second hand one - and I wasn't prepared to chance that much cash on a whim... so I let my wife drive it while I looked for a solution.

She managed to chew through a tank of petrol in about 1/4 of the usual time, so maybe that price wasn't too bad in reality - compared to the price of fuel these days.... so back to Trade Me, and I found a guy selling genuine Denso coil packs for $75! half the price of a second hand one!

I bought one.

I then pulled all the plugs, one by one - and the front one was wet - all the rest were a nice tan colour. A quick check of the front coil pack with a multimeter showed that the internal resistances were vastly different to the new one I had as well. If you look at the pins left to right and number them 1 to 4, the resistances on the new one are (all approx):

1 - 2 : 347 ohms
1 - 3 : n/c
1 - 4: 168.9k
2 - 4: 168.3k

On the front pack that I thought was dodgy I got around 25k between 1-4 and 2-4.

Also, the measurement from the output back to the pins:
1 - out: 173.8k
2 - out: 174.2k
3 - out: n/c
4 - out: 6.02k

Again, the suspect pack showed vastly lower readings: 1-out: 28.5k, 2-out: 29.2k, and 4-out:3.38k

So, out with the old and in with the new... and its running great again - although it now has a nasty auto-lag when shifting between first and second under full throttle... but thats a problem for another day.

Hope the info helps someone else in the same boat :)

Steve
--There are no personal problems that can't be solved with the liberal application of high explosives--
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