I have always considered my car to be in great shape. It has always ran awesome, always been reliable (even on extremely long trips) and has given me very minimal problems. IU drove the car Sunday and it worked great as always. The only complaint I had was that it would run too rich before warming up. But today is Tuesday and all the car does is crank. It won't start. What the ****? Thanks for the input!

 

check for spark (take off a plug wire and stick a screw driver into it and ground the screw driver on something metal n have a buddy crank the engine... it should spark, if not, possible culprits could be:

coil, ignition module (control module also called) cap, pick-up coil, etc...

are you getting fuel? can you hear the pump prime when u turn the key on?

you need to do some work before we can pin-point, go check for spark...

 

Okay, Tried the screwdriver trick. No spark. I guess I'll try to swap the old coil back in to see if that helps.

 

Oh, and how can I tell if I snapped the timing chain?

 

rotor not moving since the timing chain drives the cam and the cam drives the distributor

 

Okay, so I took the cap off to see if the rotor would spin. It did so that eliminates a bad chain. While I was in there I replaced the module. After I pieced it together I tried to start it again. This time I got a few pops out of the exhaust. The next time I got a pop and a cloud of white smoke out of the TB. I'm hoping that that was just gas pressure being released after builing up in the cilynders from trying to start it with no spark so many times. Is there any way that I can check my MSD coil and box?

 

Anyway, so I put a new coil in and disconnected the MSD box. No good. Am I missing something?

 

I'm stumped. Do you think I might just need a cap and rotor?

 

I think you may have checked the wrong way. It will spin when you crank the engine. If it spins around freely just when you take the cap off, that is bad.

Also, try not using the box.

 

OKay, so it turns out that I had disconnected the MSD box the wrong way. I had disconnected it the correct way and the car started. Looks like I need a new MSD box! Thanks for the help guys!!!