Hi folks. I have a 1998 Civic LX. Just under 160K miles. Ran when I bought it.
Some background. I am not a novice home mechanic. Been wrenching my own stuff for at least 40 years. I have done a number of timing belts on older non interference volvo 740s, never a problem, other than the time I forgot to tighten the camshaft gear bolt.....8*))).
I decided to change the timing belt on the civic. Found and used a step by step set of directions from one of the civic forums on line. Pulled it all apart, changed the belt and water pump and tension pully. I used a mirror to align the two side marks on the camshaft gear with the head to block surface. I aligned the crank pully with the mark by the oil pump. I set the engine to TDC before starting (at least I think I did, never checked it against the distributor rotor), and made sure that I didn't move the crank or the camshaft much more than I needed to during disassembly, and always restored it to premovement position.
I set the tension according to directions, and afterwards, it felt like it was at the correct tightness.
I did unbolt the crank position sensor and let it hang, but I don't think I disconnected it. Not sure at this point. The clearance from the sensor to the crank was a bit more than my thickest feeler guage, I think .040" plus. I tried to set it back to this clearance during reassembly.
The car cranks over but never attempts to fire. I did check for spark, and had a strong spark, but now don't have spark. I believe I have fuel. I hear the fuel pump cycle when the key is turned on, and the plugs are wet and I smell fuel.
Compression is fairly even, something like 115 to 125 across the four cylinders.
The car hadn't seen a tuneup in some time. Plugs were almost worn out, air filter dirty, and when I pulled the distributor cap, the rotor contact that sends the spark to each wire during rotation is pretty nasty, along with the plug wire contacts inside the cap. I scraped them all as clean as I could, still no start.
All fuses in the fuse box are good.
I'm suspecting that maybe I have the belt 180 degrees out. Or, the crank position sensor is bad, or maybe I broke a wire to it during the work.
Another factor, although slim, is that I took between 1 and 2 months to do this. I work a lot, and worked on this nights and weekends when I could. So, the car sat, but that shouldn't have caused any problems. The battery was disconnected during this whole time. I also put a charger on it, just in case it was giving the ignition system a low voltage. I have seen no starts when a battery was weak.
I will be pulling the timing covers to recheck things, or at least the top cover. Then I'll set the crank at the single mark, verify that the distributor is at #1, and check the camshaft position.
Have I missed anything? This is my first honda, don't usually mess with these things. From the directions I used it's all basics, nothing magic. Either I broke something or didn't set things correctly.... or some random part broke on coincidence.
Oh yeah, when I first put the belt on, I rotated the engine by hand 6 revolutions, and encountered no interference, and all the timing marks came up to the correct position. Also, before I tried to really start it, I pulled all the plug wires off and cranked the engine over for several revolutions thinking that if there were a valve strike, that maybe the starter wouldn't be strong enough to bend it versus the engine running definately would.......
Sorry for the length, wanted to give all details......
Any thoughts?
thanks, /glenn