Contour SE 2.0L V4

• Automatic transmission
• 139,000 miles

please excuse me >> network ops tech .. car stupid, computer and network smart. My budy working on the car is ASE certified .. "you can't know everything but what you don't know, know where to look or who does know"

Car was driving just fine and all of the sudden it starts running rough. Check engine light comes on and intermittently starts to flash. The car has, at this time, almost no power. We baby the car to work and then had a mechanic look at it. He pulls out the spark plugs and they were almost disintegrated. We replaced the plugs and the car was still running rough. With a cheap diagnostic computer we can see cylinder 3 is having issues. So we went and connect a spark detector or what ever its called (a thing that is attached to ground and then plugged into the spark plug wire where you can see the spark) 1,2, and 4 are sparking like there is no tomorrow. Cylinder 3 is sparking MAYBE every minute, minute and a half. So he figured it was the ignition coil.

For those savy on the old engines the ignition coil is what WE used to call the distributor. Come to find out the computer fires the coil like the old distributors had the rotor to turn.

We looked at it more and realized that the coil was not firing the 3rd cylinder.

NOW the neat part .. IF you replace the coil you MUST define the date of manufacture to the parts vendor. It turns out Ford changed the type of coil in May to a totally different coil. One will NOT work with the other and the spart plug cables are totally different too where they connect to the ignition coil. We found this out the hard way.

After we went back and got the right coil (I got the first one but didn't look at it) and put the right coil on it ran just fine.