Okay, here goes. I've got a 89 CRX Si with a D16A6 and a Y8 head swap. The other day while driving at speed my tach started to bounce erratically, as in, would quickly jump up a few hundred rpm and then back, or jump down. No codes were thrown. It then proceeded to get worse, sometimes dropping about 1000 rpm and the car would hesitate. I replaced the plugs, cap, rotor, and wires once this started happening and it got better for a bit but still does it.

It seems to start up once the car is warm but will do it if I get on it while cold. And it gets progressively worse the longer I drive. If I keep it under 3k it's perfectly fine. That would be fine except I have to do lots of highway driving for work and speeds of 65-80 are over 3k rpm in 5th.

I've searched around for similar issues here and on other forums and haven't found anything like this. Any help would be appreciated.

 

Try an ignitor before The Big Stop happens.

 

igniter unit in distributor. Could be a coroded wire, or just needs a new one. Buy distributor from parts store, carefully take apart, disconnect igniter unit, swap it with it to test. If problem solved, your igniter was bad. If problem not solved, the wires are coroded. Clean and retry. Return distributor to parts store and say it didnt work. Make sure it looks like you didnt take it apart. Enjoy

 

Thanks for the help all. I took the dizzy apart today and poked around in there. It was pretty dirty so I blew it out with my compressor. I also cleaned all of the contacts up especially the worst one which was the hole in the front of the igniter where the cap plunger goes into. It seems to be running much better and the tach is nice and steady now. I'm going to go ahead and replace it just in case. Thanks again.