Misfire mystery

[sclutch]

99 2.0
My wife said the car was loosing power and shuttering. I felt it "once" other than that it ran fine. Then after a day I finally got a check engine light. After pulling the codes. MAF and misfire cyl 3 cyl 2. I changed the MAF and the air filter.
Ran the car, it seemed ok. BUT then returned to a worse misfire situation, sometimes, or else it ran fine again!. Light came on again but No hard codes came up except "P0302 Cyl.2, P0303 Cyl.3, P0102 (Intake air circ. signal too low) I don't think this is anything. The wires and plugs are not very old and they visably in the dark they are not "Arcing"
From what I read here it seems the the culprit is the COIL PACK.
Does anybody have any opinions.

[JenBug]

I had a cylinder misfire at one point and it turned out to be a broken temp sensor, which caused the engine to think it was too hot and caused the misfire. It's a cheap fix, so it's worth checking out.

[GatorBeetle]

I have an issue with my coil pack...I get arcing when I spray the least bit of water on the coil pack, and it is worse in humid weather, really bad in the rain. I have never gotten any codes relating to intake/MAF. All CEL codes have been straight misfire.

I'm waiting for my coil pack in the mail...'99 2.0 GLS

[HudsonValleyVDub]

Originally Posted by sclutch

99 2.0
My wife said the car was loosing power and shuttering. I felt it "once" other than that it ran fine. Then after a day I finally got a check engine light. After pulling the codes. MAF and misfire cyl 3 cyl 2. I changed the MAF and the air filter.
Ran the car, it seemed ok. BUT then returned to a worse misfire situation, sometimes, or else it ran fine again!. Light came on again but No hard codes came up except "P0302 Cyl.2, P0303 Cyl.3, P0102 (Intake air circ. signal too low) I don't think this is anything. The wires and plugs are not very old and they visably in the dark they are not "Arcing"
From what I read here it seems the the culprit is the COIL PACK.
Does anybody have any opinions.

More than likely it's the coil pack, plugs wires or a combo. I'm getting ready to change mine and found, by looking it over well, the air pump has to be removed to get to the coil pack even if I were to just replace the plug wires so.....it makes sense to change the plugs, wires and coil pack all at once.

[GatorBeetle]

I'm lucky...no secondary air pump on my car!!

[dvious]

Just take a coil pack out, if it changes that's the culprit. If not try the next one and so on. I had one go bad about 3 months ago. First one I took out was it. Pretty simple method.

[GatorBeetle]

That's my plan.

[Porkchop]

Originally Posted by dvious

Just take a coil pack out, if it changes that's the culprit. If not try the next one and so on. I had one go bad about 3 months ago. First one I took out was it. Pretty simple method.

Except this is the 2.0L forum so he's talking about a single coil that fires for all four cylinders... not the individual coils like on the 1.8T.

[GatorBeetle]

I was thinking coil pack, plug wires, plugs...not coil pack, coil pack, coil pack, etc...

[HudsonValleyVDub]

I just changed the spark plugs and wires with stockers and it was actually quite simple on the 2.0. Removing the secondary air pump was easy as well. I haven't notice if it's running any different yet (only has 40k on it) but I only drove it a mile os so afterwards.

[iScott]

Originally Posted by JenBug

I had a cylinder misfire at one point and it turned out to be a broken temp sensor, which caused the engine to think it was too hot and caused the misfire. It's a cheap fix, so it's worth checking out.

Interesting... know why the original one went bad?
And was it giving you the red temp light?

[JenBug]

Actually, nothing went wrong with the temp light. The tech said there was some miscommunication between the computer, the broken sensor, the engine, and that's why the misfire happened. Not sure of the exact details, but I have had zero CELs or problems since, and my car is running a million times smoother now. It had been shaking and such when I started it up in the morning because the engine wasn't getting the fuel it needed to warm up, because the engine thought it was hot already.

I'm no car expert but I trust what works, and what worked was changing out that sensor.

[iScott]

I see. This sounds very promising for me as I've been dealing with a very weird misfire for quite a long time now. Is this what the sensor looks like?