hi, bear with me this may take a while! i was up in brighton at my dads place for a week and the golf ( after being sat for a week ) wouldnt idle, was very rough sounding. i got the car about 2 weeks ago so i thought yeah, ok, i`ll get a new set of sparks, dizzy cap rotor arm, ht leads etc and give it a service. i replaced all the parts and the car wouldnt start, it was turning over but not firing. eventually i gave up and called the rac. the guy looked at it, ttok off the dizzy cap and found that the top internal metal bit was sheered off ( new cap ) and that the rotor arm i had been sold was the wrong 1 for the car! so we replaced the cap and rotor with the originals and tried again. still nothing. after a bit of playing about he said the distributor had died ( or a thing called the optical sensor in the distro ) and that i would need a new dizzy. so i got a hire car, drove back to devon and my golf should be arriving back in about 30 minutes ( it happened saturday nite and i had to get back ). theres a girl across the road from me with a golf gti the same model etc as mine 8v, and when she saw the new car she asked what happened to the gti so i told her how it wouldnt start and she said the same was ahppening to hers! to i did what the rac guy did , took off the lead from the coil to the dizzy cap, hold it near a bolt on the engine and turn it over to see if it arked across to the bolt. the same happened as did mine, just 1 ark and then nothing. the rac guy said it should keep arking as it sends the sparks to the distro ( it made sense to me so who am i to argue). anyway, today jenny had a mechanic look at hers and he got it running in 5 minutes flat, aparently a problem with her cap, and she told him about the test i did and he told her that it should only send the one spark.
so... was the rac guy wrong? what could it be / what can i look for? if i need to i`ll bite the bullet and send it to a garage. the mechanic who looked at jennys is about 45 minutes away and he wants the car taken to them or he can pick it up ( wouldnt be cheap ) basically i need to limit the cost as im changing jobs soon and the training isnt cheap
