Ignition Help

[spieluhr]

hello hello

a few days ago a spark plug fouled and i only had five cylinders firing. So that was pretty annoying cause it sounded, felt, and performed like SHIT.

anyway, i replaced all of the plugs this morning (except one which i couldnt get out, and i dont want to break the plug off in the cylinder). quick question, what is the thing called that is connected from the wires to the plug? ill just call it "the thing" for this post.

so i replaced my plugs, and i found a LOT of oil on my plugs that i replaced and in the area outside the plug and cylinder. so that worried me cause i dont know why i would have that much oil in my cylinder. and 'the things' had cracks in the rubber insulator boot part or they were missing part of the end of the insulator. In cylinder two the spark plug actually blew apart, the sparker blew out the back of the threading, and i think it damaged 'the thing' because after replacing and fiddling with things it worked fine for a while and now its back to rough idling, etc.

anyway, this is pissing me off, im really close to selling this thing for an M3, and its been one thing after another

[MrChance]

The "thing" is called a coil pack. Your car has a distributorless ignition system with a DIS control module and individual coil packs for each cylinder. Cracked insulating boots on coil packs lead to misfires and grounding out- you should replace the boots as soon as you can (most coil pack boots can be replaced without replacing the entire unit).

[spieluhr]

ya, my dad and i found that you can just replace the boots, im calling NAPA and the dealership tomorrow to order new ones. thanks for the insight, and hopefully that solves the misfiring problem. as for the oil problem i read another post where someone had the same problem and it was suggested that it was a head gasket, so i might as well add that to the list of things to replace.

[xsperf]

yeah, but a headgasket isnt just that easy to replace lol..

[Casey3561]

xs speaks the truth. I replaced the head gasket in my old work van, and that was quite difficult. Considering the Mitsubishi 3.0 V6 ('89 Caravan) is supposedly easy to work on, I don't want to even consider how hard the BMW version might be.

[spieluhr]

i bought a chilton manual. ill see how hard it would be.

[spieluhr]

thanks for everyoneone's help

[xsperf]

u know, that the head gasket is in the engine block, right? that means that u have to practically take apart the engine? and u know its a bimmer, so u really dont want to screw anything up