I am the noob and I messed up my car yesturday I have a 99 and was trying to replace the spark plugs and coil packs yesturday. I picked up a set of coils from someone on the org and went to work. I replaced the plugs and put the new coil packs in. One of the coil packs looked odd in that I dont think it did not stretch as far as the others but I put it in anyways. I did not reset my ecu afterwards so my check engine light has been solid for a while. For about 5 miles everything worked great and I had no problems. After that it felt like 1 cylinder was not firing. The car would shake especially at low rpms. I felt like the car was going to stall out at when I would pull up to a light. Anyways it is a long story but I could not go home to fix it so I tried to deal with the car as best as possible. At times the check engine light would flash and I would get a smell of gasoline. I have put about 60 miles on the car and I am at half a tank and I have smoke coming out of the tailpipe. I haven't checked over the work from yesturday yet but do you guys have any guesses on the cause? thx

 

take it apart and look at it. It will be obvious if you did something really wrong. If not, you may be misfiring. Go to autozone/advanced and get them to scan your car and see what it tells you. you could start there.

 

Oh yea one other thing is that when I last turned the car off the engine kept running for about 30 seconds.

 

sounds like a bad coil or two, or a real screwed up plug install or someting crazy

 

I would say that coil pack you got that looked 'weird' was the wrong one, and now you have a bad misfire thats throwing everything out of whack, 'smell of fuel(improper detonation probably) and the smoke out of the exhaust'
that'd be my guess I would pop those futsers back out and check them closely make sure they're the right ones and all the same

 

I don't know about you but to me that would probably be an imediate alert saying> **** I ****ed somethin up...

I say pop your hood and take those babys out check to see if you did something wrong..
If it all looks FINE to you, then. drive it up to autozone like the man said cause they are teh rox0rs.

 

Get the codes checked after you pop the hood and check out the things you replaced. You did gap the spark plugs correctly.....right?

 

were you having any issues w. the original packs?

 

yesturday is spelt yesterday. nice try though

 

Thanks for the wonderfully useful post.

I'd swap the coil you said looked "weird" out with a working original one and see if it solves the problem. I'm guessing there was something wrong with it if it looked different than the rest.

 

I havent had much time to work on this issue today but I did swap the coil back and I am still getting the same results. I am going to get it checked tomorrow for codes. I ran the tank out of gas today, 17 gallons for about 100 miles, yikes. Starting up the car is difficult, something has to be wrong with one of the plugs but this makes no sense to me. Hopefully I will get a code on which cylinder to check.

 

Daaaaaaaaaaaaaamn...

When you push it down does it feel like your in 4th gear?
I got this sometimes with my old motor after I blew out the bottom bolt bearing. Every now and then when I started it up the car wouldn't go so fast, was like I was in 5th gear or something. MIS-F FTW!

 

dude I cant belive you are driving it like this
I thought I was bad with my KS, o2s and EVAP,
this is a bad *** missfire man you are going to wreck something! trust me cabbing where you got to go for now would be cheaper than breaking something much more expensive than coils and spark plugs. oh hope you dont have a new exhaust cause the cat is probably near toast by now.

 

how can you tell if the tranny is going in a 5speed ??

 

yea seriously its just a simple misfire due to the blinking.

what plugs did you use? are they gapped properly? and did you push in all the coils fully and reconnected the plugs to the coil?

 

You need to pull the codes, thats the only way you are going to find out what the problem is...unless you want to take everything apart and check each coil and each plug individually.

 

blinking light is a misfire the problem is when you drive a tank of gas with is going on you are filling the cylinder that is misfiring with gas. At this point putting the old one on is not going to fix it your plug is fouled out with gas it can't burn the left over fuel. take out the plug and clean it and try to get rid of the left over gas in the motor.

 

since the light stayed on, im saying you got a couple bad coils. if they were all good, and the ECU ran the misfire monitor, the light would have turned off on its own after 1 trip and turned into a 'ghost code' until the ECU finally determined the problem was fixed. also, did you gap the plugs? even 'pregapped' plug need to be gapped just to be safe. cause who knows if someone dropped them & bent that little metal piece...

 

That depends on what brand spark plugs you buy and how they come packaged. NGK plugs come pre gapped and have a plastic cover over the end so that even if you do drop it the metal tip wont get hit.

 

ide still gap them cause you never know. i mean, ive never seen NGK plugs so i dont know how 'protective' the plastic cover is. plus, it only takes what, 10 seconds per plug? so it couldnt hurt double checking. better than having to take them all out again and checking them if there is a problem that could possibly be due to the plugs.

 

If its not the coils, it is definitly a faulty injector. My dad had the same problem on his Solara.

 

Here are the codes I got P0300, P1130, P1320. I am going to look those up and go to work here doublechecking everything.

 

0300 i couldnt find. 1130 swirl control valve control solenoid valve, 1320 ignition signal.

wish i could help you out a little more, but i have no idea where to start with those.

 

I checked out the plugs and there was 1 that was soaked with gas. I tried to replace it with a new one and hook everything back up but it just fouled out the plug. I did this again and the other plug got fouled out. I did not know what to do and wanted to put an end to this madness so I dropped it off at the dealer. Now I am just waiting for them to tell me some bull**** about how I need $600 of coils plus some other ****. I hate the stealership.

 

When you pulled out the coil that "didnt look right" what did you put back in? another broken one? Should have tested the odd looking coil and the other one you put back in.