Igniter Repair for Cheapskates

[Spook50]

My mechanic just installed a gm part on top of the coil igniter, similar to the one in the photo earlier in this thread. I was worried about the heat build up I read about here. He told me that it’s not going to be a problem here, at 7,500’, high in the Colorado mountains. Like right now, it’s sunny and clear, and about 35 degrees. I never drive my rig outside of the valley I live in, and never longer than about 45 minutes max, just to town and back, 14 miles each way. I guess I’ll find out next summer when it’s warmer. But to the point of the thread: the gm work around part works fine. Mechanic said he looked around on the web, found a Toyota repair site(?), called me and said the only oem part was used, and $300 or more. It’s tire changing season here and he had a lot of other, more urgent work. Also he had to order diodes from somewhere, which took like 3 weeks to get here. Long story short is I am glad to have the old rig running. Only weird thing was it was idling way too high, but I know how to adjust idle speed. Unfortunately for me, I don’t know much about electrical stuff.

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How long have you been going to this mechanic? I ask because, well, I'm just going to be blunt: That looks like a serious hack job. Those terminals are going to oxidize and corrode in very short order and cause you problems, the crimps are barely there and I'm sure you could easily pull the wire from the terminals with very little force, and once the weather warms up again I will be shocked if that unit's useful life isn't severely reduced.

Yes I admit I'm a perfectionist/elitist when it comes to electrical work, but I honestly would've lit up someone who did a job on my truck that was left looking like that.

 

[poptart]

My FJ62 died this weekend, about 3 hours from my house. It was driving just fine, and all of a sudden, it was dead. Troubleshooting on the side of the road showed no spark. Figured it was either the coil or the igniter. A super friendly farmer lent me a coil off his tractor to test, but no joy. Primary was about 3ish Ohms, Secondary was about 14k Ohms on both. I know the FSM says "Primary coil resistance (cold): 0.52-0.64." Curious how important that is, considering that one coil was a known good.

Unfortunately, I had no service and couldn't look at the FSM for testing the dissy. I did pop the cap, and nothing looked out of place; I also know the coil was receiving power. That being said, I'm fairly confident that the igniter is faulty, which led me to find this thread.

Going through all the wiring diagrams I could find and all the posts about the GM Igniter swap, can someone double-check my homework and make sure I'm not missing something? I have all the parts on order, and I'm planning on driving out to swap the igniter this weekend. Trying to get it running in order to save the $600 on renting a truck and trailer in order to drag it home. Anything else I should check while I'm out there in case this doesn't work?

 

[poptart]

No luck with the GM igniter. Troubleshooting with zero service and no FSM isn't fun. The issue turned out to be a bad Hall effect sensor in the distributor. Didn't realize this until after I had cut up and swapped the ignitor. Ended up renting a U-Haul and towing it all the way home. Of course, it's been trying to rain every drive out to the mountains, and it finally decided to when I was towing it with a U-Haul. Will say I was pretty impressed with the 6.6 V8 in the truck.

Luckily, I left enough wire length on it to solder everything back together with the original igniter. Just need to set the timing today.

Still a bit curious why the GM igniter didn't work. I figure the FJ60 peeps and all the other non-ECU cars, it probably works fine as they run directly to the distributor. Not sure if the ECU on the FJ62 is outputting the correct signal for the igniter.