OK, so I'll run through exactly what I've done and hopefully someone can pinpoint what went wrong.

My car has been running rough the last few months. I initially thought it was a turbo going bad and just yesterday realized that my check engine LED burnt out and that was normally how I would tell when it was time to replace another coil pack as it would flash after certain RPM's.

So basically for the past month or 2 I've been driving on a bad coil, maybe 2.

I plug in the OBD scanner and got back 6 codes...

P0030, P0161, P0134, P0156, P0300 & P1159

The first 4 I believe to be Oxygen sensor related and I've replaced all of those over the past few years and have become annoyed with them.

So attempting to go after the misfire I removed the plastic air tubes and the cover to the coil packs. Figuring the best way to test the packs would be to have the car running and unplug each one individually until I found one that didn't effect how the motor runs.

The first issue came when trying to start the car, without the tubes it would run for a couple seconds then die. While hooking the tubes back up I noticed oil residue in the twin tube that runs down the center and oil in the metal tube that connects to it.

Upon reconnecting the tubes the car would run. I then started to unplug coil packs and thought I had found the one causing the issue so I replaced it. The car ran more smoothly but when accelerated the rpms would rev up and then jump.

I continued to plug and unplug until I got to the one on the far right, when unplugged I didn't notice a noticable difference so I took out the bolt and pulled out the pack realizing I forgot to unplug it and could hear the spark arcing. I thought right then that obviously the pack is working and before I could get it plugged back in, the car died and will not start back up. Just turns over.

I've put everything back together the way it was and still nothing.

I also tried unplugging the battery for 10 minutes thinking it might be electrical. So such luck there either.

Since the car should start with one or 2 bad coil packs. I'm thinking it might be the ECM? If so, I do have an extra one laying here from my 99 t6, would I be able to just unplug the battery and swap them? Or is there programming involved. If in fact this is the cause. (What with all the O2 codes, I'm thinking it might have issues with ECM there as well)

Thanks!!

 

Wow, 60 views and no responses. Oh well, I tackled the beast yesterday with a more logical approach. I thought I was messing with the coil pack when I shorted the pack out on the cylinder head. With a little more thought I realized the ECM would have a safety measure and low and behold, there's a fuse labeled "Ignition coil packs" and it was blown. Replaced fuse. Car started right up.

Of course it continued to die due to air flow issues and oil residue in the plastic tubing which I still need to figure out. But hey, I'm happy, it's running again.