91 Grand Prix, 3.1 liter.

NOthing is broken (knock on wood) almost 185,000 miles on it, drive about 70 miles a day, every day, still.

Looking at it and there is no distributor.

There are 6 spark plug wires coming out of the block right in front, but no distributor or coil that I've seen.

How does this system work?

 

Did you follow the plug wires? The 3.1 uses a coil pack (DIS) IIRC.

 

Not real familiar with the 3.1 V-6, but.......

Most modern engines are distributorless. The mechanically driven distributor typical of american V-8s doesn't fit well in to front-drive chassis architecture. The box that the plug wires are plugged in to is most likely the coil pack. Most cars use one coil per every two cylinders, and some, like the LS-1, use one coil per every cylinder. Coils themselves are not very large, have you ever looked inside your HEI? The coil is about the size of a pager, and does for all 8 cylinders. You may be looking at the coils and just not seeing them.
As for triggering them, instead of the classic points and rotors of a distributor, they use a 'Hall-effect' sensor, similar to the crank-trigger systems you often see on racing engines. A small, 6 (or 4, or 8) toothed rotor is mounted on the camshaft, or on the cam drive, and as the cam rotates, each tooh on this rotor passes a sensor that registers the field generated by a magnet in the tip of each 'tooth' on the rotor. The signal from this sensor is read by the ECM, which fires the appropriate coil or coil pack.
The advantange of this system is better packaging, more reliability (you can limp around on 4 cylinders, if a coil goes bad), as well as the ability of the engine to advance or retard timing on its own to respond to performance/economy needs.

Hope this helps.

 

I'll have to look again, all I saw was where the wires connected at the block itself.

Either way, how does this sytem work?

 

Thank you. That explains it. Now I know a little bit about what I'm looking at.

 

dammn speed cat............... u b smart