Hello everyone, im personally a subaru person and have lots of experience working on subarus, but dont know much at all about mazdas. My father has a 1994 626 lx manual transmission 2.0L and is experiencing starting issues. The car has around220,000 miles on it. When the problem began, he would strart the car in the morning, it would start up fine and immediatly die. I replaced the distributor cap and rotor, new plugs. The problem was still there. He took it to a shop behind my back and they said the only code they could get was a code that pointed to the distributor. They replaced the distributor on the car, and it ran fine that day. The next morning the car had the same starting and stalling issue, and then would not start at all, he took it back to the shop and they thought the distributor they put on was faulty and put a new one on. They had to replace the plugs because they apparantley were fauled from the attempted starting and had gotten some gas on them. The car ran fine today, but i fear it will not start tomorrow. The car also has had a check engine light on for probably 15k. Ive never worked much with distributors because all subarus after 1990 have DIS. Any input would be greatly appreciated, i hate watching my dad spend money at shops!!

 

I would find out what the check engine light is trying to say first. that might lead you in the right direction to look.

 

for a quick test for your ignition coil pull the plug and put the wire one it crank the engine and see if the spark is orange (bad coil) or blue (good coil) that will tell you if your distributor is working properly

 

I would check out the ignition module. On those cars particulary they seem to have a mind of their own, and sometimes a bad module will trigger a distributor code.