mike_and_friends

First off, while I love my Yota, I'm not super experienced with working on it or cars in general. Have only ever done smaller repairs and maintenance, so I apologize in advance if I ask you to dumb some things down for me.My 93 pickup died on me last week out of nowhere while driving. Got it towed to a shop that checked it over and found no spark, said I need a new distributor, coil assembly, and igniter (see picture). I gave a big hell no to the $1,700 they wanted to do all these so I got it towed home and ordered a distributor and a coil assembly.

They both arrived today and my distributor was pretty shot with a rat's nest of copper wire everywhere. I replaced it, tried to start it. Plenty of crank but no turnover.

Then I tried replacing the coil assembly. Again, plenty of crank, but no start.

On the work order, they were going to replace the igniter as well. I've looked online and they all seem pretty expensive or suspiciously cheap. It looks like shipping would take a while too, and my truck is my only vehicle and I don't love being stranded at home. I've also read there's no way to test an igniter but my roommate's old voltmeter read something coming from the connector that goes to the coil from the igniter. It's an old voltmeter with a little hand that moves instead of an LCD screen so I can't really tell how many volts or amps or whatever it's measuring (I know absolutely nothing at all about electricity). Is there anything else I should do or test before buying an igniter? According to the work order they already checked quite a bit but is anything worth looking over again?

2ToyGuy

The igniter can be ohmed out. The FSM has the readings you're looking for, and what pins in which plug to check.

A quick, easy check to see if there's a pulse going to the distributor is to hook your timing light's inductive pickup to the cable that goes to the middle of the distributor. If it flashes as the engine is cranked, it's good. If not, probably good idea to go ahead and replace th coil and igniter both.

You can also check the wires going to each plug the same way. No flash, bad wires. Cheap easy fix, just be careful to put the wires in the right place on the distributor for the correct plug. Replace them all as a set. Use OEM if possible.

Check the pickup coil in the distributor is good. Again, the FSM has the reading you're looking for, and on what pins. There is an air gap the coil need to be from it's pickup. Again, the FSM has the distance reading you should get with a feeler gauge. I can't recall the right reading at the moment, but I can look it up if you need.

I used those Simpson 260 meters, like you described you have, my entire career as a radar tech, both in the Corps, and after I got out. Once you learn how to read them, they're very quick to read at a glance, and they are indestructable. It's a good meter to have. You're actually lucky to have one, believe it or not. You can google how-to use and read one on line easily.

Good luck!
Pat☺

scope103

I've looked, and I've never found any FSM procedure to check the igniter. http://web.archive.org/web/201212070...12onvehicl.pdf (certainly not "ohming it out.") Just because I haven't found it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but I've put some effort into this. https://www.yotatech.com/forums/f116...gniter-287857/ A replacement igniter is pretty spendy; it's worth doing the tests described by 2toyguy (and the tests in the FSM, and the extra ones I describe in the above post). You want to eliminate as many other problems as you can.

I can almost guarantee you that mike_and_friends doesn't have a Simpson 260. (just in case, here's a picture of one) It's the 21st Century; a perfectly adequate digital meter can be had for next to nothing. https://www.harborfreight.com/7-func...ter-63759.html

2ToyGuy

I learned on those Simpson, so they kinda stick in my pea-brain as the best.
Kinda like I learned to drive in a Manual Trans, so to me, that's the way to go.

Just me, though
Pat☺

scope103

Well, the Simpson 260 was introduced in the 1930s. Much to my surprise, Simpson still makes the model 260-8. If you've got the coin, you can still buy them. (The price of a 260 is the main reason I doubt mike-and-friends has one.)

Just like driving a stick, learning on an analog meter requires you to understand more of what you're testing. For instance, you don't care about polarity with a digital meter; it just displays the voltage with a minus sign. Putting a large "backwards" voltage into any analog meter will damage it. A digital meter will give you resistance with 2-6 significant digits. Reading resistance on an analog multimeter is an art. Don't regret the time you spent with an analog meter.

Simpson flacks their legacy meter by referencing how it makes looking at trends easier. But you can get very accurate digital meters with bar-scales; those can give you trend information and much, much more at a fraction of the cost.

Bottom line: if I still had one of those $300 analog meters, I wouldn't use it on cars.

mike_and_friends

Thanks for the replies guys and sorry I ghosted the thread.
Turns out I have the dumb and didn't properly time my distributor, lol. I have a feeling I didn't even need a new coil assembly, but no way to know. Oh well. Works great now. Thanks everyone for chiming in!