Today I was driving around town, car's running great all week since I recently got it tuned by Ellis Groo (aka Twofast4lv on forums).

Anyway, I was sitting at a stop light, light turns green I take off normally. The clutch just starts to engage and then the car lurches forward and dies. Would not turn over, cranks just fine. Couldn't get anything more than sputtering out of it at best.

Got towed home, looked in the fuse box in the engine compartment and the ignition fuse was popped. I replaced it and the car started up just fine. I took it out for a spin, hoping that it was just a freak thing that happened, got about 5 miles away from home and it happened again.

I brought a handful of 10A fuses and swapped one out. Car starts fine, but as soon as I put it under a load (i.e. taking off from a stop) it pops the fuse again. I replaced the fuse several times, then gave up and got towed home again.

Background: I have not changed anything in the ignition system. I did put a stock MAF back in, in place of the Granatelli I had since I got the car tuned. I thought maybe it could be the coil, but in my experience with coils they either work or they don't work, no in between. It's currently running the stock coil. I unhooked the MSD 6AL box after the first few fuses popped and that was no help.

The only other item I can think of that I have added to the ignition system was when I installed an electric water pump I installed a relay harness and hooked up the reference power wire off of the little pink wire in that short harness that runs to the coil. I installed the water pump over 2 years ago so I think if that was a problem it would have showed up a long time ago.

Anyone else ever run into this problem? I had my Auto X-ray scanner hooked up to the car for this last ride and didn't get any codes to start with, so I'm at a loss currently. I will start looking in the schematic but I'm still clueless where to really start. I was half tempted to just hard wire the 10A fuse slot together just to get me home, but then I didn't feel like burning the car to the ground just yet. I also don't think the tuning could have caused this because if there was a problem with the tuning I would have seen it as soon as I first started the car up.

Any and all help GREATLY appreciated!

 

I run my EWP power from the injector side for power. Since your running from the coil end, I would look at the harness wiring on the EWP, or possible relay going south. Might want to temporarily wire the EWP to the battery and see if the problem persists. You can even wire around the relay and see if you still pop fuses.This would at least eliminate the problem to the EWP or coil power system.

 

I popped this fuse and it turned out that I had melted some wires to the header on the passenger side (the small bundle of wires that run down next to the header and go to the underside of the car).

Oh, and if the car is cranking, then it is turning over. It's just not firing.

 

I understand that. I was up most of the night shooting wires and just plain looking things over. I checked the pins in the plug to the pcm (passenger side fuel rail) and according to the book everything's getting the proper signal, power, ohms, etc. over there.

Man, this system isn't all that complicated when you look at a schematic but damn if I can't find anything peculiar. And until I find SOMETHING I will not be taking the car very far from home for fear of needing a tow truck again. At least I'm glad I paid the extra $3 a month through my insurance company for the towing service. Got my money's worth out of them yesterday.

 

You need to find if there are any other loads on the fuse. Which is the fuse #? If its #11, it only goes to the coil and the IC Module. If you've used that wire for power to some other load, you have to figure out what could have gone wrong with that part of the circuit.

 

Yes, it's #11. right now I'm just trying to pull the pink wire out of the harness to check it over. So far I've found that it runs from the fuse to the main harness and snakes along the fuel rail.

This is the same wire I used for reference power to the relay harness for my water pump. Is there a possibility that the pump is laboring, causing an excessive load on the ignition wire? The pump doesn't sound like it's running any different.