The Wangle

So, I bought my gsr earlier this month and its been a blast. It has had a few nagging problems, though, that have been seemingly getting worse. I noticed what sounded like something between a rattling heat shield and the beginning of rod knock. After a couple days, I decided to start a little investigation and put my ear up to the distributor. It sounds like the bearings inside are shot.

I have since been looking on pretty much every honda/acura related forum and found diagnoses ranging from improper t-belt tension to a bad oil pump. I checked the t-belt and noticed that there is quite a bit of slack between the cam gears, almost if not more than an inch. The timing is seemingly good as far as the power goes though, and the belt was done about 60k ago. I havent had my oil light come on at all.

I also pulled off the dizzy cap. I saw a fair amount of corrosion on the contacts of the cap and also some on the rotor itself. I cleaned it all so that the contacts should be better. What really disturbed me was that there is what looks like a big gouge on the cap and rotor from the rotor contacting the cap while spinning.

I couldnt adjust the tension of the t-belt because magilla gorilla tightened the tensioner, so I just buttoned it up. Now along with the noise (which is most noticeable cold) I have a more frequent misfire. Before I would get a random misfire once in a while, while cruising on the freeway only. I originally attributed this to the fact that the plugs and wires are about 5 or so years old. Now my misfires seem to happen once or twice a minute. I am not getting any codes and the care FEELS completely drivable with plenty of power when its not misfiring.

The misfire I will likely attribute still to ignition and will replace everything from the rotor to the plugs. I just want to get this noise fixed though. Especially if its something that could escalate to something much worse.

As always, any help will be greatly appreciated.

wunfstgsr

Post video of the sound!

The miss fire could be from a loose or bad ign. rotor in the dizzy! those are easy to replace and cheap.

Or you may have slipped a tooth on the timing belt if its too loose, you want at least a half inch deflection on the timing belt.

wunfstgsr

Theres always a weird rattle with the integers when i had both my 98 and 99 gsr i had weird rattles all over until i removed all the heat shields when i replaced the exhaust and that fixed that but i even had a rattle once that would be very pronounced at 1500 rpm and had me 99% sure it was a rod knock of some sort but ended up being a rattle inside the OEM header right at the collector! so it can be many things but a sound clip will help us further more to diagnose the sound.