I got my first honda yesterday. a 91 civic hatch. 4 speed manual.

The car was driving great. Then on the way home I shifted into second and the car fell on its face. I downshifted back to first and it got life back. Shifted into second, and no problems. Then a little later down the road it did the same thing in 4th gear. Downshifted into 3rd and it took off again. It never did it the rest of the way home after that. But I would like to find out what is going on. My sister was behind me the whole time and she said both times the car did that, there was a very foul smell coming from the car...


Any ideas? The car is making no noises. No smoke that I know of.

 

umm time for a swap

 

as much as I'd like to do that. Its not going to happen for a while. It's my daily for now.

 

possible clogged cat

 

clogged cat.....

 

time for a routine tune up. It could be alot of things:
-fuel, fuel filter, spark plugs, spark plug cable, distributor, ignitor, coil, sensors (map/O2/IAT), injectors.....

Goodluck

 

Ok so its doing it a lot now. I am going to hollow out the cat today and get now plugs, wires, cap and rotor, and fuel and air filters today.

But now it will bog all the way down and cut off. Then it takes a couple of tries to restart it. Does this change anything? Or still just routine maintnence stuff?

 

Sounds like a dirty motor in general to me. I would do all the routine maintenance plus run some lucas injector cleaner and upper cylinder lubricant through there to clean it all out. If the problem has gotten worse then I would imagine if you clean it all out (including possibly getting a new cat) then you shouldn't experience the problem any longer. Like I said, I would get a new cat if you want it to remain a daily as opposed to hollowing out the existing one, since a hollowed cat on stock exhaust would sound really bad IMO.

 

I replaced cap, rotor, wires, plugs, fuel filter, and put in some lucas' fuel intjector cleaner.

Then it ran worse then it did from the start.. It was odd because if I pulled out the wire on cylinder 1 the car would run like it was before i changed everything. Then I plugged it back in and the car would just die or not even start.

Someone who was helping troubleshoot recommended that I check the timing. So i pulled off the cover and it was dead on..

Just before I was about to give up, I checked the firing order...... yeah. Whoever had the car before me had the firing order wrong. Fixed the wires, and bam.. The car runs like a dream now.. Doesnt bog. doesnt smoke.

All I can say is, Duh

 

Awesome. Glad its up and running again. It ALWAYS seems to be something retarded simple like that. For instance, when me and my friend did a b18 swap on his CRX, after all was pretty much finished, we would step on the gas and it would sit there and hold at around 3k, kind of jumping off the rpm like a slow rev limiter. We checked the code the engine was throwing and found out that the wiring harness on the fuel injector for cylinder 4 was not clipped all the way on. I pushed it on and there it goes. Worked like a charm haha. This of course was after we swapped the spark plugs, plug wires, took the distributor cap off and cleaned and inspected it, blah blah blah.