BigBoulda

After my hatch being off and on the road for many years for various reasons and me not wanting to deal with them, I am finally back to using my 1992 Civic DX as my daily driver. It is running fine for the most part and still fun to drive, but there are a couple of (hopefully) minor issues I am having with it. I think they are unrelated but I am not sure.

Details about the car:

-1992 Honda Civic DX 3 door
-B16A2 from 1999 Civic Si
-JDM ITR Intake Manifold and Throttle Body
-JDM OBD1 P30 ECU
-PLX M300 wide band O2 Sensor
-MSD external ignition coil
-No CEL lit on the cluster - EDITED to ADD NEW INFO

Known Problems that I haven't resolved yet:

-Wire Harness side connector of knock sensor broken off - not sure how to reconnect
-Wire Harness side connector for fan switch broken off - jumped wires so fans run all the time (I know this is not ideal, but better than no fans)

So, the issues that have been bothering me that hopefully you guys can help out with:

-Temp gauge inside the car shows a normal temp reading but does not drop down when I shut off the car. I don't know if the needle is just stuck in place or what but even before I start the car in the morning, the gauge shows it is already at temp. It doesn't really bother me that it stays at a normal temp reading when the car is obviously not warm, but it worries me that the gauge will stay stuck at the middle reading if the car starts to get hot meaning I won't know if I am overheating. I check the coolant in the reservoir and at the radiator often because I am paranoid, but that doesn't mean it might not overheat while driving. I thought about disconnecting the fans and idling the car until it gets hot to see if the gauge starts to shoot up, but I would rather test this without purposefully overheating the car to find out. How can I trick the gauge into going up without actually getting the car hot. If I do find out the gauge does not go up when it should, is there some way to fix this without replacing the whole cluster? Is there some way I can "engineer" a separate temp gauge to use in place of the built in gauge?

-At cruising speeds when I am at very partial throttle the car starts to run lean (as indicated by wideband and the shitty way the car starts losing speed). It is as if the car is not recognizing that there is throttle input. It acts as if I let completely off the gas. If I smash on the gas it picks back up and starts to accelerate strongly and sometimes goes back to cruising normally, but sometimes keeps running lean so I have to drive like an *** accelerating and backing off continuously. Being that the car is really loud and I have to drive through areas where the cops look for an excuse to pull you over, I don't like having to drive on-off-on like this. This seems to happen most often when it is hot outside (live in Texas so it has been hot a bunch and will continue to be for many more months) and after I have been driving for some time. If I stop the car and restart it a bit later, the issue seems to resolve itself sometimes.

-At other times, when I am cruising with very little throttle input, the car is running more rich than it should be and VTEC won't engage when I wind it up. According to the wide band it is 13.5 ish with almost no throttle instead of the 14.7 ish it should be. When it is running normally, it usually doesn't hit 13.5 af unless I am over 25% throttle or under load like when I go up a hill. Then when I do give it some boot it drops down to 12.5 ish at points it would normally be around 13.5 and then VTEC doesn't engage when it should. This is less bothersome to me than when it runs lean because I don't have to drive erratically to keep my speed going, but I would prefer it to not run off either way. Also, not having VTEC kills much of the joy of driving this car. Like the above scenario, this scenario is also not consistent and seems to happen more when it is hot outside. Then again it is always hot outside so that may not be a factor. Also like the above if I stop the car and restart it the issue seems to go away often on its own.

Sorry for the long post but I am trying to be as detailed as possible so I can get this sorted out. I am getting too old and poor to use my old methodology of randomly replacing parts to figure out what is wrong with it.

Any help to get these issues ironed out so I can drive my ride with pride again would be much appreciated.

BigBoulda

Any ideas? Anyone?