Meter's ground wire to the battery negative post or a paint-free point on the engine or body. Positive probe to the wire that is the same color at every injector or ignition coil.
Digital voltmeters usually don't respond fast enough to catch that first one-second pulse when you turn on the ignition switch. That's where test lights are better. If the 12 volts comes back during cranking, the voltmeter will see that just fine, then that one-second pulse is irrelevant. No need to use the test light at that point. It's only when you don't have 12 volts during cranking that the initial one-second pulse becomes valuable. Knowing if it is there will prove the ASD relay is switching on and the fuse feeding it is okay. Actually the ASD relay circuit is very trouble-free. If the fuse is blown, you'll have a crank / no-start condition. That is almost always caused by a wiring harness that fell down onto hot exhaust parts and a wire melted and is shorted to the exhaust pipe. The wire that feeds the oxygen sensor heaters is the same circuit that feeds the injectors and ignition coils.
When the ASD relay turns on for that initial one second but not during cranking, that is always due to the crankshaft or camshaft position sensor's signal is missing. About half of the time that's due to a failed sensor and about half of the time it's due to a cut wire or corroded connector terminal related to one of those sensors.
One problem I run into quite often is the meter's test probe doesn't make good contact with a terminal when I back-probe a connector. When you do that at an injector, for example, if you see 12 volts for that first one second, or if you see it during cranking, you obviously know the probe is touching the terminal. If I were to see 0.38 volts, that had to come from somewhere, and it wasn't through the ASD relay. I would call that "0.00 volts", and attribute the 0.38 volts to stray magnetic interference. You'll even see a very low reading like that when the meter's probes aren't even connected to anything, but are just laying near the engine. For a circuit of this type, you either have 12 volts or you don't have 12 volts. Assuming the battery is not near dead, anything less than battery voltage is not acceptable. I said it that way because the battery's voltage is going to be drawn down to less than 12 volts during cranking. If it gets pulled down to, say, ... 10.8 volts, you can't expect to see anything higher than that at any other place in the vehicle, at that time. This is another reason I like the test light better for this type of problem. It's not the exact voltage we care about. It's do you have something or nothing?
Don't worry about testing the control side of the injectors or ignition coils. Those are pulsed on and off by the Engine Computer in time with the signal pulses from the cam and crank sensor signals. It's true those circuits won't be switching on and off if a signal is missing, but the ASD relay won't be getting turned on either. You'll see 0 volts on both sides of every injector and coil. To say that a different way, if the 12 volts is showing up at the coils and injectors during cranking, we know the sensor signals are there, then it's up to the computer to switch the coils and injectors on and off.
You can't measure the switching side with a digital voltmeter. At times you'll have 12 volts there coming through that coil or injector from the ASD relay, and at times the computer's switching circuit, (driver circuit), will pull it down to near 0 volts. Digital meters take a reading, analyze it, then display it while they take the next reading. Some times it will see 0 volts and sometimes it will see 12 volts. Old analog meters with a pointer would average that out, but digital meters show exactly what they see at each reading they take. The display will be bouncing around and you won't be able to make sense out of it.
Monday, April 5th, 2021 AT 8:10 PM