The car broke down on me this morning on the way to work about a mile from the house. It turned out to be the trailing ignitor. The car didn’t even sputter, It just shut off.  I spent about an hour waiting for the tow truck to show up. Once I got the car home, It too me less than 30 minutes to dig out the ignitor and swap it out.  I’m lucky I have about 8 of them in the garage.

The trailing ignitor runs the tachometer on all 1981-85 RX-7’s but on the GSL-SE it is also the crank angle sensor of sorts and runs the fuel injection system. When it died, the fuel system completely shut off. The easiest way to tell if the trailing ignitor has died is looking at the tach. If the tach sits at zero when the car is being cranked than there is a high chance that the trailing ignitor is shot.

It looks like I’m going to need to replace the heater control valve. I’ve been smelling coolant slightly since about January but I haven’t seen any moisture. I have the replacement that I installed in my black car (removed it before I scrapped it).

I’m going to have to remove the entire dash to do the install and at that point I might as well swap out the carpet that I’ve had in the garage for a while now.