[Kenny]

well after 3 months of sitting in my driveway, i finally found out whats wrong with my escort.

if anyone remembers or cares, my car died in the middle of the road about a month after having the crankshaft rebuilt. it had been plagued by timing problems but with the rebuilding of the crankshaft it was believed that the problem was solved.

well after ruling out the possibility (or at least excluding) of a timing problem, we checked all the wires, plugs, even the coil, because we thought it was an ignition problem, since there was no spark coming from the distributor. we figured that it had a bad wire somewhere.

my friend´s father the mechanic came over and determined that the car was having trouble getting spark, same as we did. he couldnt figure out what the real problem was tho so he decided to sleep on it and come back the next day. well he came back today after thinking about what he observed yesterday. he realized that the distributor was in fact not spinning like it should have been, so it was not delivering spark to the combustion chambers.

DUH. all this time, and i never checked to see if the damn distributor was spinning. but now we wondered why the distributor wasnt spinning. my friend tried a new distributor, and this yielded no change. so we figured that the camshaft or the cam gear had broken. we tried to start the car while watching the cam gear, and it spun, so it was not broken. then we removed the valve cover and tried to start the car. the camshaft did not move. there was no cracks or breaks in the camshaft. we figured out finally that the little key that holds the camshaft and cam gear together. again, DUH.

this whole time, the problem was simple. it will probably cost me more to get the car towed to my friends shop than for him to fix the car. but hey, after this is fixed, i should no longer have a timing problem, which is what i believe made my car slow the past couple years.

in good news, the whole interior of the engine was in mint condition. it was clean, with nice clean oil inside. there were no scratches, no cracks. it was amazing. that proved to me that paying the extra for mobil 1 pays off.

 

[Steve]

good job. something is wrong w/ my scort. It´s battery is always dead when i go out to start it. the battery is fine, but something is pulling liike 5 amps when the car is turned off. something is staying on, who knows what. I checked fuses, no go.

 

[TheBlade]

if your luck is like mine Steve...your dome light is shorting and sucking your battery dry...but of course its still operating normally so you dont expect it

 

[2redscorts]

Steve, check your ignition switch. My 91 had the exact same problem as you´re describing while my friend still owned it. The switch was not turning everything off, even tho the key was off and out of the car. After many jump starts, she had the Ford dealer replace the ignition switch, and the car has been 100% electrically ever since.

Hope this helps!

 

[birddog]

Well, if you are willing to wait a few days to find out. Use this approach. Every night pull one fuse out of the fuse block. a different one each night. the day you wake up and the battery has not drained, you know the circut the short is on. from there it usually goes pretty quick.

 

[CosworthWannabe2]

Never rule out a short to ground. This can drain the battery and cause the circuit to basically become a resistor. The quickest and only way to check for this is to take a test light and put the wire end on a constant+ source like the lighter or better yet directly to the battery´s + terminal. MAKE SURE THE IGNITON SWITH IS OFF!!!!!!! Then probe each fuse individually. If the light comes on then bingo that´s your shorted to ground circuit and what is causing the gradual drain. After you isolate the problem cicuit you then probe the wire at the component end of the cicuit and this will give you the basic are where the short is occuring. My ´89 had it and it was related to the switch for the driver´s door. Took me 1/2 an hour to find and fix the problem. Having the schematics for the car is almost a neccesity to do the job though, I hope you have a book or it will be basically a guessing game with the spaghetti.

[ This message was edited by: CosworthWannabe2 on 23-12-2002 05:12 ]