Why is my engine cranking but not starting? Welcome to Mercie J where compassion and craftsmanship come together. I'm Rick Smith.

So if we're cranking fast, properly, it's going to sound, *Rick noises*, and not, *more Rick noises*. So if we’re cranking good, we've got step 1.

Step 2, we need to have a healthy engine, so we have to have compression. A few things that can affect compression that can cause us problems are cam timing can get off. We could have a timing chain that has failed. We could have piston rings that are bad because we overheated the engine or something like that. We could have a plugged exhaust.

So there's a number of things, but that's the first thing we have to have, is we have to have good compression. The second thing we have to have is, we've got to get fuel into that engine somehow.

So our fuel, it has to either… we first of all supply it from the pump, and depending on what kind of a car we have, that pump's gonna supply it to a secondary pump, it's a higher pressure that would be on our direct injected cars.

On the lower pressure system for injection, it's just gonna go to our injectors. And then on an older one it would go to our carburetor so we pumped a fuel up and then it has to be injected, so our computer has to turn the injectors on and off. So we have to make sure all those things are working.

And then the last thing is, we have to ignite that, and we have to ignite it at the right time, so our spark plug, once we have compressed that and we have a nice mixture of air and fuel in the cylinder, that spark plug ignites it and then if fires and the engine’s running.

So a couple of things that can affect that we could have a problem with ignition coils, we could have a problem with wiring, we could have a problem with maybe a computer not commanding the spark to happen.

So there's a lot of variables there but you primarily need 3 things and it's much more technical to find out how to find them, but we have to have compression, we have to have fuel and we have to have a spark, we have to have the right quantity of all 3 and we have to have them happen at the right time.

I hope that helps to understand this a little bit more. Thanks for watching and until next time, safe travels and blessings to you.

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