Our '07 manual cranked fine yesterday when we drove home but would only spin until the battery was nearly dead this morning. Autolite XP plugs look good and have good gap. What else can go wrong?

 

Check the plug for the crank sensor. It is angled back towards firewall, the end is pointing directly at crankpulley. The sensor is held by one bolt, should be a 2 or 3 wire plug.


Some cars it wont crank if bad, some like ours with coil on plug will crank motor but not fire.

Make sure that area is clean!!

 

 

Went to Autozone to get my recharged battery back and the red shirt said that shortly after he started charging it, an error code came up saying it was a bad battery.
But my son said it spun the engine for about a minute in shorter increments so it did have a charge. It is a Honda YUSA battery so I'm guessing it is six years old as that is the age of the car.

 

Dont instantly believe a partsstore employee. They are there to make money, and some stores DO pay employees a small bonus for higher sales.

Go to walmart or harbor freight and buy a cheap multimeter, and use DC voltage and test the battery. as long as voltage displays xxx.xx or furhter decimals, you can see if the battery is slowly leaking or not.

Partsstore battery chargers are set to be VERY sensitive to battery age and wear/tear. Your battery might only be able to charge to say 90% capacity, and still be fine, but that charger will say NOPE BAD BATTERY

 

Did they give you a printout of the battery test? If so post it here.

 

When you say "spin," do you mean the engine was turning (normal cranking sounds, just not catching), or just the starter motor was turning (a softer, higher-pitched whirrr noise)?

On the off chance that it's the latter, that would indicate either a mechanical problem with the starter, such as a binding or gummed-up bendix or worn overrun clutch, or possibly a broken tooth on the flywheel.

Assuming you mean the former—the engine cranked without catching—there's a lot of possibilities, but the ones suggested here are good places to start. It might also be a good idea to quickly double-check that the immobilizer is happy, i.e. that the green key light on the dashboard isn't staying on or flashing repeatedly. (It should just blink on momentarily when you first turn the key on, and then go off and stay off once the system accepts the key.)

 

In testing the Fit crankshaft position sensor, should the screen read "1" when the b and c prongs are touched by the probes? Or should it give an actual reading?

The only thing about car batteries is that they can be drained to about 25 percent of their charge only, like, three times before they go bad. I have no idea if this six-year-old battery was ever taken down that far. I worked at Autozone for a couple of years and while the company wanted to sell batteries, the red-shirt CSR employees, none of whom got spiffs for selling them, really wanted to earn the trust of their customers.