I have been trying to diagnose a bogging prob. with my car for a while now. I done a few tune up things like new cap, rotor, ingnition coil, and fuel filter. I am going to check the pcv valve today. When I went to check the resistance of my plug wires, a didn't get any reading from my multimeter. I checked some other plug wires I had sitting around and it worked fine on those. I have a continuity setting on the meter that I can use to check if the wires are continuous,but that doesn't even seem to work. it beeps to let you know if what your testing is continuous.

So my question is, how can the car still run if the wires are open. Can a spark still make it to the plugs even if the wires are bad. Is it possible for the spark to jump the gap??

If the wires are bad, could that be causing my bogging problem?
Any insight or explaination regarding this topic would be great.

Peace....

Yes, the spark certainly will jump a gap inside wire. It just doesn't arrive at the spark plug with the same energy that it had before it jumped that gap in the broken wire.

Ohm's Law, resistances in series and their voltage drops, if you wanted to know why. As far as that being the cause of your bog, I can't say. But I'd sure fix it, then check to see if the bog is still there.

OK, so even though I might have bad wires, the car can still run??? If the spark isn't as strong as it should be when reaching the plug, that means the air/fuel mixture may not be combusting completely. Thus not fully burning all the fuel. Maybe that is why I seem to be running rich. It's all starting to make sense now!!! That could be the solution to all my problems. We'll see..... Looks like I'd better get me some new wires.

Thanks

Peace out..

Yes the car can run with bad wires.

It would be a wise idea to replace plug wires(coil wire) & plugs. You can get a set of NGK's from Summit Racing for $20.00 or so.

Yeah dude it's probably the wires cause my zc was bogging really bad and then I put my d16 wires on it and it runs like a champ.

Ok, I finally got some readings off my wires. I have the multimeter set at 20k ohms. With that setting, I got a reading of 10 on the meter for the shortest one and a reading of 19 on the longest one. I assume the middle two are in between those numbers. So what exactly does that mean.
Since the meter is set at 20k, do the numbers add to that so I get 30k for the short one and 39k for the long one? or is it just 10k for the short and 19k for the long? If its the first set of numbers then the wires are bad. if the later numbers then the wires are still good. I borrowed the meter from work and has no manual so that is why I don't know how to read it. Any thoughts?

Peace....

Just replace the wires & plugs.

http://www.binghamtonlife.com/manual/2gsm/images/91-23-62.jpg

Heres a question, are you holding the ends of the ohm meter? Your body is actually conductive, and 10k ohms is a bunch. A wire should be virtually ohm-less, especially since its a spark plug wire. My guess wouldbe that they are your problem, becuase 10k is too much. I think the 20k means that it will read up to 20k ohms in that order of magnitude, whitch is confusing. So that means that a 10 would represent 10k ohms.
The wires arent that expencive, replace them. Id do the spark plugs too even if the wires fix it, becuase now the plugs have probably been exposed to over richness for a while, they might also go bad. If you dont replace them, at least file/clean them and regap.

HTH
Buzz1167
Jon N

300-1000 ohms per foot is pretty standard for spark plug wires. You'll see less with crappy performace wires like nology, or maybe more with crappy stock carbon based wires.

Most spark plug wires aren't anything like a normal wire used for headlights, your stereo, or house wiring. They are used to transmit incredibly high voltage in very short bursts. In order to do so and not cause problems with any electronics nearby, they need to have a reasonable amount of resistance.

They do make solid core spark plug (super low resistance) wires for cars without any electronics, but they won't work very well with your Honda, or any modern vehicle with electronic controls/radio, etc. Pure drag racers with carburetors are pretty much the only ppl that should use these wires.

So, if you have a plug wire that's 2 feet long and it reads 19k ohms from end to end, you probably need to replace your wires. Magnecor is my personal favorite, but a lot of company's make decent cheap aftermarket wires. NGK's are decent I hear. I have a set of $15 Aerospeed's from Ebay, and they have high quality fittings and seem to run well. I'd buy magnecor myself if I wasn't so cheap. :D