'93 civic, engine cuts out while driving on highway ?

Thanks for all help Tegger and jim beam,

Problem was definately the ignitor.

Went with your advices and purchsased Honda parts, the
ignitor/ICM was ($126).

installed ICM and car fired right up.

the bent dist. cap contact spring must have come from some lazy
azz who did not want to pull spark plug wires to put distributor
cap back on (dealer replaced the distributor about 3 years ago)
but that seems to just mean the shell/housing as they transfered
all the old internal parts {ICM,coil, rotor, dist cap} to the
new distributor housing

I went ahead and checked the Mains Relay (for solder problems)...
i must have the new design as there was lots of solder on the
connections with very large traces between the connections,
looked good to me.

thanks again for the help.
robb

 

Aha, I see. So if the current goes up, that changes the product of IxR.

Now it makes more sense. I didn't know the current changed during coil
dwell time.

So then...With a Kettering breaker-points system, the points gap
provided control over dwell. With Honda's electronic system, an IC is
monitoring voltage across a resistor to determine dwell.

Do you know what's used as a "snubber" for the ~200V back voltage from
the primary? Or is one even needed? In the old days you had a condenser
for that task.

 

I'd agree with that.

See a whole page, with more details, here:
http://www.tegger.com/hondafaq/igniter-failure/index.html

 

the switching transistor may have an internal bypass diode.
Many TV sets have transistors that have the diode built in.

 

well,it IS a ceramic substrate.
It looks like there was a bond failure on that one pad. that should not be
a very common problem.
My own experience is that you cannot resolder them once they break,but
others have said if you use "special solder",you can.I can't say how
reliable that would be,but I'd not risk it.


It also looks like the switcher transistor is a bare chip die bonded to the
aluminum backing,interesting.
I'd say that this igniter is a lower quality one than the one depicted on
Graham's Rover page. That one uses eyelets to connect to the ceramic
substrate's pads,much sturdier mechanically.

Nice page,BTW,Tegger.

 

Thanks for the information. I'm going to update the igniter pages one more
time to reflect what you've helped me with.

 

Thanks.

I seem to remember that Honda once had a TSB or HSN article on igniter
failure where the OKI igniter was bad and the NEC one was good. I can't find
it just now, though...