Why my car keeps pinging?

[WetBehindEars]

My car is an '88 K car. I discovered that the spark wire - that incidentally does not go to any of the spark plugs, but some other contraption, was pinging against my engine, and producing a spark there.

So I went out and bought Borg Warner wires, and put them on. It seems as though my car would idle rough, and I suspected it was because when I removed the old wires from the cap - one was stuck and think I broke the socket removing it. Either that or I didn't put it on tight enough. So I put the wires back on, and it seemed better for awhile - smooth idle/acceleration.

What happened was the the car is really noisey, like the fan is on, and exhaust starts coming out like crazy.

Now the same thing happened again just before. I popped the hood, and that same stupid wire is touching the engine and sparking (less pronounced however than the old ones). I even discovered a crack in the old wire, where it must have been pinging off the engine, but now what?
PS- I replaced the plugs, and then later the wires, but not the cap.

thanks Nick

 

[94MaxGXE]

simple.....replace the cap/rotor and get that sparking wire away form touching the the engine....

[ October 19, 2004, 12:10 AM: Message edited by: 94MaxGXE ]

 

[Gary Allan]

Yeah ..what he said ...

Btw- Are you saying that the coil wire (that's the one that pokes out of the center/middle of the distributor cap) is arching (sparking from it to the engine) ..even though it's BRAND NEW??


Just "where" on the engine is it sparking??

You're not allowing the wire to lay against the exhaust manifold, are you??

(what kind of normal? Abbie normal.)

 

[The_Jeff]

K-car plug wires have to be snapped HARD into the distributor cap... are you doing this?

 

[WetBehindEars]

Thanks - I did check to see if they were snapped on hard to the cap, and one of them was loose! I hope this solves the problem.

I am not replacing that cap. I shouldn't even have replaced the wires.

The only reason I did was because they were arcing. I laid the middle one up against the cap shield, and in front of one of the spark wires so as to not touch the engine. It wasn't pinging when I looked at it briefly before.

thanks

The old middle wire was arcing against the engine, and now the new one was also, but not as bad. It's arcing where it touches the engine - toward the bottom by the cap.

thanks.

[ October 19, 2004, 10:57 AM: Message edited by: WetBehindEars ]

 

[Virtuoso]

quote:

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Originally posted by WetBehindEars:
I am not replacing that cap. I shouldn't even have replaced the wires.

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??

 

[WetBehindEars]

I don't want to do this stuff because it costs a lot of money, and the car seems to run OK without it. Not to mention every time I do something to it, takes like 5 tries to get it right, and the car runs worse.

My car smokes like a stack house on occasion, and I think it might be some unrelated thing besides the wires.