Blows optispark in seconds! Help!
11-13-2016, 08:22 PM
#1
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Join Date: Nov 2016
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Blows optispark in seconds! Help!
Recently I purchased a 96 z28. The person I bought the car from had the front of the engine apart claiming the optispark went bad and he didn't want to put it back together. I purchased all the parts and a rich porter optispark from amazon. ( didn't want to spend a lot to find out engine is blown up or something). I hooked up most everything on the engine and fixed a few connectors I saw messed up. I plugged in the optispark, not bolted to the engine, hooked up coil wire and 1 plug wire with plug grounded and spun by hand. All injectors worked, along with a bunch of other noise of things powering up. No spark. Changed ICM and tried again. This is where the headache started. It sparked and injectors work about 1 turn then nothing. Everything went dead. Seems to be no signal from optispark. Bought another opti hooked it up and it did the same thing. Now I have two brand new blown optispark units. Does the opti need to be bolted to engine for a ground? Am I blowing these things up trying to check spark? I'm lost. Everything seems hooked up elsewhere, the pcm seems grounded. The ground strap on the driver side of the engine is still disconnected. Has anybody else had this problem?
11-13-2016, 09:58 PM
#2
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Location: Born on the Florida West Coast, now where can I retire?
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Re: Blows optispark in seconds! Help!
On all the ones I have seen there is no connection to the metal base. But I haven't seen one like yours. Theoretically it doesn't need the base grounded to work. Not not having it grounded might cause some sparking to the base from the rotor; and with the base not grounded, that spark could jump to the electronics inside I suppose.
It would seem that if the spark was jumping to the base, it would shock you while manually spinning the shaft.
You can see if the Opti is still working by having someone watch the tach while you spin the Opti shaft. The tach needle normally moves up a bit, the amount of movement depending on the spin speed.
It would seem that if the spark was jumping to the base, it would shock you while manually spinning the shaft.
You can see if the Opti is still working by having someone watch the tach while you spin the Opti shaft. The tach needle normally moves up a bit, the amount of movement depending on the spin speed.
11-13-2016, 11:55 PM
#3
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Re: Blows optispark in seconds! Help!
Actually the second one I tried it with did shock me a little that's when I started thinking about that. It's pretty aggravating but I guess I'll just have to dig into it a little further. I might try that with the tach.