Feel dumb but what the heck is a coil pack?

 

lion,

ONCE UPON a time, back in the day, in the stone age Fred Flintstone drove a vehicle with one coil. It would "kick up" or amplify the voltage going to each cylinder's spark plug. A high voltage is needed to create the "spark".

Todays Ford Triton engines have an individual "coil" located on each sparkplug that do the same thing. I'd like to know the upside of this "improvement". The downside is obvious.... seven more expensive parts that WILL fail and need to be replaced!

Bill

 

Thanks for the explanation. Guess I am showing my age since I still remember the old round black coil that sat up next to the distributer. Hope the eight on my 5.4l don't fail very often.

Dave

 

well the advantages are more voltage to the plug, less RFI interference, fewer moving parts (no distributor), no rotor or cap to wear out, more money for dealers when they fail.

 

I had one go out on my truck, before I knew anything about them. It took the dealer here 2 days and $240.00 to fix it. Consequently, I had one go out on my city work vehicle. The garage scanned and fixed in about 10 minutes. I haven't been back to the dealer since...

 

The higher spark voltage helps emissions... that's basically why any of this stuff has been done...

I have 10 of them, but the reason I like it is because there is no single point of failure except the EEC.

Sure, you can lose a coil pack or two... it'll run like crap, but it'll get you home. Lose that single coil on your '69 Mustang, and you're dead in the water.

 

The older 4.6L will have two coil packs - one for each bank of pistons. Had one fail and the car rocked like a disco while only hitting on 4 of 8 cylinders. At the time I had never heard of a coil pack either - costed me some serious scratch before I got out of the shop back in 1998.

The hotter spark is also why Ford only uses platinum plugs - the hotter spark pits the electrode on regular ones. Don't let anyone talk you into the "Split Fire" plugs they're just a gimmick. The platinum plugs are truely an advancement (as far as spark plugs go).

 

Yup, I have two MN12's (t-bird/cougar) that have two four-post coil packs.

I've changed plugs at 20K miles and had the car run totally different. Even the platinum ones... on 4.6L's ...