'95 3.1 running rough

[inovation]

I recently purchased a 1995 Beretta with a 3.1 in it and at the time I thought it needed just a set of plugs and wires. I took it to the mechanic to have him replace these and to run diagnostics on it to see if any thing else was wrong with it and well he called today and told me that the motor was junk and it needed to be replaced. The plug in the number 5 cylinder was fouling really bad and had some gunk on it. I just don’t believe him. Any help would be appreciated.

[jsgold]

Usually a bad coil. very common. You can remove the wire with the engine running and see if it affects the engine, or let it spark to the body / frame and see if it has a nice blue spark that goes 2-3 inches. Otherwise you can remove the coils and use a meter on them and measure resistance. Just went through this for the second time on our Corsica a while back. You can replace one or them all. Ours had 200K on it so I replaced the coils and the igniton module since I had it apart. Might be a bad injector or something like that, or simply the plugs and wires as you suspected, but I would be supicious of someone simply telling me a motor is shot without a LOT more information. these motors usually last 230-270000 miles if taken care of. They do have problems like all motors but I doubt his story.

[inovation]

I changed the coil in it and its running a lot better. Thank you very much for your help.