Only sparking 1 and 6 318i with 325e swap

[xevlids]

Hey
I am near the end of a 325e drivetrain swap into a 318i coupe.
Having troubles with getting the car running.
I have spark only on 1 and 6 after coming out of the dizzy.
I have checked all plugs and leads.
They all ran when plugged straight into the coil with constant blue flash.
But when using the dizzy only 1 and 6 spark with a very low spark.
Any ideas ?
Can has new dizzy and rotor good leads and plugs coil works fine
I am pretty certain everything is hooked up fine etc have been working on it for a while now to get it running.

Any ideas will help cheers

[TobyB]

Huh. With a traditional ignition, I'd say your points are not aligned with your distributor cap.
But an e uses a signal from the flywheel to time the spark, and the distributor
just routes it around.

Did you mess with the timing belt? The cam being out of time would do this.

How about the distributor- is it possible the cap/ rotor got damaged/ replaced with a bad rotor/ misaligned?

The strong blue spark at the coil narrows it down to spark timing or distributor (cam) timing....

hth

t

[jlevie]

The first suspects in the case would be the distributor or ignition wires. If you didn't use an OE/OEM distributor cap and rotor, replace that and the wires with new OE/OEM parts.

Just in case you don't know what it means, OE parts are those you get from BMW and OEM parts are those made by BMW's supplier.

[xevlids]

Never touch the timing or cam, have only cranked the engine by hand.
Is there anyway to aline the distributor and rotor ?

[xevlids]

Even with the old cap and rotor the car does the same thing.

[TobyB]

That's really odd- no, there's no way to realign the rotor relative to the cam. The rotor
has a very wide tip to give it a good shot at hitting the terminals, but that's all you get.
And it just works...

Is there any way something could have gotten grounded in the HT side?
Long shot, I know...

t

[xevlids]

We are Thinkng it is trying to run a 4 cyl
Not 6.
Any ideas from that ?

[jlevie]

Uh, you did replace the engine harness, AFM, and DME with 325e parts, right?

[dewme5]

What transmission are you using? Does it have /need the flywheel sensors? If your new motor only has 1 nub on the front dampner, your other cylinders are controlled from the flywheel teeth.

Sent from my HTC6435LVW using Tapatalk

[jlevie]

You can't use the 318 transmission with an M20B27 engine from a 325e as the transmission doesn't have the timing sensor ports. At this point we really don't know what the OP has done.

[xevlids]

Everything including harness and gearbox was swapped with 325e
Could it be some crazy wiring issue?

[jlevie]

In the sense of engine harness, coil, or DME, no it could not be a wiring issue as the same parts are used for all cylinders. A flaky harness that is degrading the timing data from the sensors could do this, but it would almost certainly be random. Only the distributor, ignition wires or plugs could cause a consistent misfire on one or more cylinders.