Bought a 2000 Xj guy told me that the battery died and haven't been able to start it since so I figured easy fix?well he changed cam sensor did nothing.. He ordered a cps and it was for a gc and wrangler... Dude was a nugget. So I bought a new cps after ohm checking the one at auto parts store and compared to mine and they were diff so I bought it installed it and still nothing! Put gas in tb and didn't even want to fire... I'm sure it's not getting spark, but want to check it, how are you guys checking spark on 2000 up xjs?????
And I ohmed out all the fuses they all had resistance so that's not the problem..
Don't have time to be throwing parts at it, and need to get it fixed any advise would be appreciated thanks! Butch

 

Just a quick question. Did you try holding the accelerator down a little while cranking? My 97 wouldn't start after I replaced the battery, found out it was a bad Idle Air Control valve.

 

Yes I have, it does not even try to fire?

 

The coil design for the 00-01 is significantly different than that of the single coil and distributor setup on the earlier 4.0. You basically have three coils firing 6 plugs in the correct sequence, every crankshaft rotation (waste spark design). This is an engineering departure from the older, single spark every other crankshaft rotation.

You can test the coil pack like you would the old single coil design, but its more technically involved than physically accessing the spark plug end. Because of the design of the coil rail, don’t test the coil rail one spark plug port at a time. Testing one port at a time causes the remaining coil ports to be free floating (ie, not properly grounded through the spark plug). Free floating an encapsulated coil secondary causes significant increases in the voltage induced in the secondary. This increased voltage can easily exceed the dielectric breakdown of the coil secondary and could cause the coil windings to arc internally and break down the insulation. If this happens, it has the effect of reducing coil energy delivery potential in the best cases and in the worst cases, causes the coil to fail. You need to install all 6 spark plugs to ensure you won’t damage the coil rail.

Because it is difficult to guarantee that you can correctly ground all 6 plugs at once, you should make up 6 separate jumper wires about 2 feet long. Pull the rail and flip it upside down. Insert 6 sparkplugs into the rail. Attach one end of a jumper wire to the threaded part of the sparkplug with a large mouth alligator clip and attach the other end of the jumper wire to engine ground. Once all 6 are hooked up this way, you can then perform your engine cranking test while observing spark on all 6 plugs.

 

Good info tjwalker

 

Got it! Cranked it enough to finally get a cel and ran my scan tool on it said cam sensor failure, so I put the old cam position sensor on that po put on. And it fired right up! So either it had a bad crank pos sensor and he put a bad cam on it so when I changed the crank sensor still wouldn't run? Maybe a short I guess I'll find out!

 

WOW! And all in 1 simple thread. LOL!!!

 

Lol hey now I needed the others to keep ppl on track hahahaha get some answers !

 

And for me to spend half an hour deleting all those threads!!!!

 

Lol sorry, fixed the problem redone loaded app all good now! Thanks

 

We're all good to go.