About one day after I put my new wheels and tires on, my engine started misfiring very badly. When I say " very badly ", I mean VERY BADLY ( bad enough that it shakes the whole car and vibrates the roof ). This misfire smooths-out a little bit upon acceleration, but it is always very noticeable at all RPMs and speeds.

Not having much time to mess with it, I took it to Lute Riley Honda to have it diagnosed. After paying them $99.00 to diagnose it, the technician says that I need new spark plug wires. According to this technician, my spark plug wires were arching inside of the boots so badly that the boots were burned. I paid them their money and took the car home.

After I got home, I noticed that the technician was full of ****. There were no burn marks on the boots of the plug wires whatsoever. The technician's " burn marks " were some white marks on the boots of the plug wires where silicone grease had gotten hot and dried up. However, I went ahead and took the technician's advice even though I knew that he was probably wrong.

This morning, I replaced my spark plugs, spark plug wires, distributor cap, and ignition rotor. The cap and rotor are both OEM Honda parts, and the plugs and wires are both NGK parts. Seeing as how my suspicions that the technician was wrong were correct, I began investigatin the issue myself ( which pisses me off because that's what I paid Lute Riley Honda to do for me ).

One thing that I noticed was that whenever I pulled the spark plug wire off of the plug in cylinder #2, the behavior of the engine does not change at all. On cylinders #1, #3, and #4, the engine will run noticeably worse if you disconnect the spark plug wires while it is running. However, disconnecting the plug wire to cylinder #2 while the engine is running does not cause the engine behavior to change at all.

With that said, I suspected that I may have had a bad fuel injector in cylinder #2. I took out my fuel injectors and swapped the injectors for cylinders #1 and #2. I started the car back up again, and the same issue is occurring. The behavior of the engine dramatically changes when you disconnect the spark plug wires to cylinders #1, #3, or #4, but the engine's behavior stays exactly the same when you disconnect the spark plug wire to cylinder #2 while it is running.

Here are some other notable points:

1. I ran an entire bottle of fuel injector cleaner through the engine while driving it home from Lute Riley Honda ( while it was missing really badly )
2. The misfires start to occur approximately 2-3 minutes after you start the car ( the engine runs fine for about 2 minutes after you initially start it up )

I'm ( at this point ) thinking that the problem may be the electronic spark module or the ignition coil. The reason that I think that these may be at fault is because of the fact that the engine starts to miss about 2-3 minutes after you initially start it up. Perhaps the spark module or the coil are getting hot and causing problems.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

compression check

 

That happened to me one time. You might have "blown" (or whatever you call it) a cylinder. My car was shaking very badly and I pulled the wires one by one. On one cylinder, the car did not vibrate more but stayed the same. Turns out that the fuel injector in that cylinder was unplugged. Doesn't sound like the same thing for you though... Do what he said ^ compression check They sell compression checking tools at autozone for like $20. Good luck, and I hope you don't need a new motor.

 

Pull the #2 plug and wire out, ground it, and crank it up, see if the #2 plug fires spark or not.

 

Wow! Great write-up. I think you're the first one who has organized his thoughts, wrote properly, and included vital info!

First thing I would do is confirm that #2 is firing. I have a strong feeling it's not. If it's not firing, it could be your ignition coil or the distributor. I'm leaning towards a faulty distributor.

If it is firing properly, then I would check the voltage going to that fuel injector.

Hope this helps.

Also, if you can, you should talk to the Honda dealership you took it too. They should refund your money.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by AndyD &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">Wow! Great write-up. I think you're the first one who has organized his thoughts, wrote properly, and included vital info!

First thing I would do is confirm that #2 is firing. I have a strong feeling it's not. If it's not firing, it could be your ignition coil or the distributor. I'm leaning towards a faulty distributor.

If it is firing properly, then I would check the voltage going to that fuel injector.

Hope this helps.

Also, if you can, you should talk to the Honda dealership you took it too. They should refund your money. </TD></TR></TABLE>

There is fire going to cylinder 2... I see it with my own three eyes. I took it back to the dealership, and they re-diagnosed it for free. They claim that they are " 99.9 percent " sure that I have a bad injector. I ordered a set of Accel injectors today, but the shop ordered me the 260CC injectors when I actually wanted the 310CC injectors. If I am correct, the stock ECU shouldn't have any problems compensating for the slightly larger 310CC injectors. Is this correct?

 

If you tried swapping injectors and it didn't change the cylinder that was misfiring, if it really was only #2, then the injector wasn't your problem.

As roskilly said in your other thread, you can't change injector size on the computer, it won't know and won't compensate.

I'm gonna go with trying another coil if you have a friend or can get a junkyard one.

 

sounds like distributor, i had this problem one time, but what had happen was that someway, somehow the rotor in the distributor had come loose and was just moving around everywhere. off its axis

 

So did replacing the injectors solve the problem? I have having the exact same problem and I replaced the distributor, the cap and rotor, wires, plugs, and even the injector I thought wasn't working.

 

WOW talk about bringing a thread back from the dead! Seven months ago was the first post. I hope the OP has solved his problem by now.

 

I am having the same problem but on cylinder three. How did you resolve the problem?

 

His fix might not help your situation unless you followed the exact steps as he did.
Did you change spark plugs,plug wires,rotor,distributor cap? Excactly what did you do you so far and how did you come up with your diagnostics?