I was driving through town earlier today and suddenly upon accelerating from a stop light I felt the telltale sign of a toasted coil pack. Rough idle, no power, flashing cel, and the sound of a subaru coming from my engine bay. I've been here before, and not having my laptop handy to read codes, I pulled over to swap some coil packs in a parking lot. After I grabbed a spare from the trunk, I pulled the harness off cyl #1 and started the car again - No change. "That was lucky" I thought to myself as I pulled the faulty pack from its home and installed the spare. I closed the hood, put the pulled pack away, and prepared to go home. Started the car - no change. Now I'm thinking how unlucky I am to have received a doa pack from the dealer last year. No problem, I have two spares.
After swapping in the second spare and seeing no change I start poking around. Wiggling all the connectors, tracing the wires, checking hoses... That's when I found this:
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The insulation around my #1 injector harness had broken/melted away to the point that the wiring within shorted out. Seeing that the wires were indeed touching, I reinstalled my original coil pack and spread the wires apart being very careful to keep them away from the valve cover. Like this:
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I started the car to test my theory and she fired up perfectly. No rough idle, no subaru sound, no flashing cel. I grabbed some electrical tape and a zip tie from my roadside Macgyver kit, re-insulated the harness, and tied it back away from the likely culprit (valve cover), like this:
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I was going to repair it for real this evening but now it's dark and the wrong car is in the front of my single file driveway. I'll do it in the morning. I did take it out again to grab some groceries with my ghetto fix and all is well.
Edit: Here are the codes it threw:
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Originally Posted by iHaveBoost?
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