Hi folks, long time no see.
I have a few electrical questions, but first I will regale you with a sort of funny story from earlier today.
Long story short, I just did the most bootleg temporary "get the car home" fix of my life.
I was about 5 minutes from home at the supermarket, and the car died, no spark. I rigged a test light out of a wire and a spare bulb, and found that the coil wasn't getting any power.
In the interest of getting home before all the good parking spots were gone (5-6pm), and to get the groceries in the fridge, I ran a jumper straight from the battery to the (+) side of the coil. I also noticed that the negative alternator wire had broken off, so I wrapped that around the post a few times and tightened it down. I found this odd, but moved on.
Then I got it started and running, and discovered that the alternator light was on, which it hadn't been before the problem happened. I remove the jump box once it's going, one of those ones you charge at home then keep in the trunk, and the car dies. Great, I used all the juice from the battery while testing, and the alternator of course won't keep the car running since it's on the fritz.
So here's the "fix" - I get the car started with the jump box again, look around to make sure no one is looking to see the embarrassing and dumb thing I am about to do, and proceed to lodge the jump box inside the engine bay, get the hood down as far as it will go, and drive home.
Now, here are my questions.
-First off, on the coil power thing: the hall sensor wiring seems fine, everything else *looks* ok (it's not one of those very corroded engine bays), the fuse box is 100%. Does this sound like the ignition amplifier? One item of interest is that 3 days ago, I had something weird happen where the radio shut off, the abs light kicked on, but the car still ran. It only lasted a minute and then everything was normal. This same thing happened just before the car died this time, except it obviously didn't fix itself.
-While I was troubleshooting the alternator thing, I tried jumping the negative ground straight to the top engine ground, and still got the charging light. There is power to the (+) side when the engine is off so that wiring must be fine. What else is there to the circuit that I'm missing?
