saltypants

I have a 90 CRX Si that has lately been developing a symptom and I was hoping some of you might be willing to provide an estimate on its diagnosis. This issue only happens when I'm idle and I've been driving around for awhile so the motor is at normal running temp.

I'll come to a stop light and all of a sudden the motor will shudder and the RPM's will drop down to between 100-300. It sounds like it's struggling for something. 9 times out of 10 it occurs for maybe 3 seconds or less and then the RPM's will shoot back up to normal and the motor goes back to regular idle. Twice now I have tapped the gas pedal while it was struggling, trying to give it some gas, and both times I have touched the gas pedal it triggers a CEL that goes away as soon as I stop the car and restart it. If I do not touch the gas pedal it almost always corrects itself and returns to idle without a CEL. Only once in the last three months, since this started occurring, has the motor actually died. But then it cranks right back up again?

What do you guys think? Does this seem fuel injector related or maybe a distributor issue? I have no clue. I'm lucky that the problem corrects itself the majority of the time, however the whole thing is getting annoying and I'd like to source it and take care of it.

peanut butter

I don't know for certain what this could be but it sounds kinda similar to what my car does when its really warm out and idles low but I dont get the CEL. It would help if you could find out what the CEL is.

My gut feeling says there is something with your ignition system...timing/distributor more likely.

I had a loose rotor on my distributor once and it would jerk the car at a certain rpm but never down low like that.

This is kinda tough man, good luck.

Hopefully someone else chimes in.

SohcZcCrx

It's almost definitely ignition related. Possibly an ignition wire going bad, or something else. Try doing this. Pull each ignition wire off of the spark plugs or off the distributor one by one, plugging it back in each time, and see if one of the wires is bad. You'll know because if you pull a wire off, then it's not running on all 4 cylinders and the motor will bog down. If you pull one and it doesn't make much of a difference, you know that the wire is already crap. Make sure the wires are clicking in to the spark plugs also and have good contact. It seems strange that it wouldn't do it all the time when you slow down, just sometimes, but something could be losing contact randomly. Try it and see if you get any results.