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Warning: a 2007 Corolla with a no-start took me 11 hours and it was a $9 part
Customer rolled a 2007 Corolla into my bay on a Tuesday morning, cranked fine but would not fire, and I figured it was a fuel pump so I quoted it and got started. Pulled the back seat, checked pressure at the rail, and it was dead on spec, so there went my easy afternoon. Spent the next two days chasing grounds, swapping the cam sensor with a known good one, even yanked the whole intake to peek at the injectors. The scan tool showed nothing, no codes, live data all looked normal, which drove me nuts. Turned out the crank sensor connector had a tiny crack in the housing letting moisture in, and at 280k miles the pins had just enough corrosion to kill the signal when it was cold but read fine once everything warmed up. I found it by wiggling the harness while watching RPM on the scanner, and the reading dropped to zero for a split second. New pigtail was $9 and took me ten minutes to solder in. Anyone else ever get smoked by a connector instead of the actual part?
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valwest14d ago
Heard a guy on a podcast say like 60 percent of no-starts he sees are wiring or connectors, not the part itself. My old shop lead used to say the same thing, that a scanner will lie to you all day long while a bad plug hides in plain sight. Cold weather is usually what flushes those out too, since heat makes the metal swell and close up the gap.
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