All I have to do now is * locate * the six spark plugs and their wires.
If you have standard spark plug wires, you can do a few things to see if they are crapped out on you (old school methods I was taught)
Go out at night and fire up your car, pop the hood, and turn off all the lights. Sometimes when spark plugs crap out, you can see power arching off of them (blue sparks or lightning stuff.)
If you have a spray bottle with water in it, you can hit spark plugs with it and if your motor stalls when you spray one, it could mean its bad.
If you pop them off of the park plug and the distributor (one at a time) when the engine is off, you can hook up each end at the metal part of the wire and check it for resistance. When I was at a shop, generally we would say they were bad if they had over 14,000 ohms of resistance or more. The ones on your car could vary though, you could find that figure out on the internet.
If you car runs better after it was warmed up, I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a coolant temperature sensor that was bad. Electronically controlled engines don’t run right when they don’t know if they are warmed up or not. I had a Chevy truck for a while that never wanted to run right when it was cold. It was a 14 dollar sensor, super easy to change out.
If you don’t have any check engine lights on, the OBD-II scanner won’t do you any good, they read the codes that trip your check engine light. Some cars won’t throw the engine light if the coolant temperature sensor is bad, it just interprets the incorrect readings from the sensor and makes your car run like crap.
If you have spark plug misfires though, they will trip your engine light. If your engine light is blinking at you, don’t drive the car if you can help it. When its blinking its telling you that the engine is most likely dumping raw fuel through the exhaust and you will toast out your catalytic converter in a hurry.
Misfire codes will look like this:
P0300 - general hard misfire (this will cause your engine light to blink angrily, BAD)
P0301 - misfire, cylinder 1 (steady light, the car can point it out to the first cylinder)
P0302 - misfire, cylinder 2…
P0303 - misfire, cylinder 3
It will go all the way up to cylinder 6 with P0306.
Less likely, but a partially stopped up fuel filter can cause the same stuff to happen, and you won’t get a light most of the time for that either.
These are some general tips though, they might not apply to you. Good luck.
At the top of the engine, along the center line, is a long rectangular cover. Remove it and you can see the ignition coils and spark plug wires; remove the wires and you can see the plugs.
Cover is shown in black here.
Three spark plugs are beneath the orange spark plug boots shown, and three are beneath the coils (squarish black things) – here.
Thanks!
What does that green arrow point to?
Looks like a fuel pressure test port to me.
In my car–something of a prototype for the C-280 model–a large rubber tube crosses the top of the engine block at the back, at something of an angle. Must be part of the fuel system (air intake).