Folks...

I've got an 87 Honda Accord (I know, I missed the '90 cutoff but hopefully someone can help...). Carbourated, manual with cruiz and AC... Here's the issue:

It started loosing coolant and blowing white smoke out of the tail pipe, so I replaced the head gasket. No big deal, just a couple of saturdays - nothing out of the ordinary, no brain stumpers, etc... Got it all put back together and crossed my fingers to fire her up. Took me a while to get her started, made a few adjustments, etc. At the moment she'll start hard (couple or three hard gas pumps and around 10 seconds of cranking) but once she's going she idles very hard and low (~350) and then slowing pulls up to around 800 before choking back down to ~350... she'll occasionally die on the low end. Things I've tried:

In the course of the new head gasket, I replaced most of the accessories - water pump, all the pulleys, spark plugs, rebuilt the distributor, new misc gaskets, etc. I did NOT remove the carbourater from the intake manifold... I read that the gasket between the carbouater and the manifold is a notorious leaker...

My suspicion is obviously a vacuum leak somewhere - if I put suction on the idle control valve, the car settles out and idles around 1000 very steadily - she purrs... no vacuum is comming out of the tube from the carbourator body, so that's at least part of my problem. Another issue is that the car won't rev past 3,000rpm - doesnt matter how hard you pump or slam, the engine won't climb above 3K... possibly throttle linkage, or another evidence of vacuum leak?

I've spent the last few hours looking for a misrouted vacuum line with no luck - I am pretty confident that I hooked her back up right. The timing is dead on...

My biggest issue right now is finding the leak - all I can hear is the carbourator sucking in air so it's tough to hear any leaking... the way things are going, I may just have to replace all the tubes? some lines have suction, some dont (obviously some are in use during idle and others arent..)

Anyone run into this before or something jumps out that I've missed? I'm getting tired of tinkering with it and my wife is getting tired of me taking her van all the time...

Thanks!

-Dave

 

Not sure where any of us can be help to you... for sure it sounds, by your descriptions, like a vacuum leak of some kind, but tracing it down from behind a computer screen is not going to happen. You didn't say that you replaced the manifold gasket... have you? 21 years of operations is bad on an old gasket... I am sure that's probably a good place to start. Also, if you have CV carbs, you may have a torn diaphragm in the carb housing... this would lead to symptoms such as you are describing