So I just had a horrible weekend as far as the Honda (97 Accord) is concerned. I pulled a bonehead move and did something that I already know is going to cost me hundreds of dollars. Please, somebody with a lot of knowledge help me out here.

Car:

1997 Honda Accord SE (4 cyl. non-Vtec, auto)
~160k miles

Story (If you don't wish to read how and why it all happened then just skip ahead to "Current Position":

Car was idling pretty rough, worse with the AC on. I had the Haines repair manual and thought, "Hey, I worked on cars quite a bit in my late teens. I'm sure I can troubleshoot this." I started going through the steps to test the EGR, solenoid, etc. Things were going great until I got to the solenoid. Haines was very clear about how to test the voltage. Test the black and yellow wire on the harness, be sure to ground; plenty specific for the layman. Then came a little ambiguity. "Now run a jumper cable to the positive terminal of the battery while observing the ground and watch your vacuum gauge. Vacuum should occur within one second." What's ambiguous about that you ask? Only the part where they don't tell you that you are now supposed to be touching it to the solenoid terminals and NOT the harness. Now normally I think about these things before doing them, but things were going so well and Haines had been so descriptive about which wire on the harness in the last step I figured we were still working on the same thing. Nope. When I thought I had found the problem, because obviously no vacuum occurred, I started the car up and prepared to drive down to Autozone to purchase a new solenoid. Much to my surprise, the "Check Engine" light was on. "Oh crap, what have I done?" I drove to Autozone to take advantage of the free check engine light service. Surprisingly, the car seemed to run better. We plugged in the OBD2 tool and something about the Oxygen sensor came up. "Huh? I didn't go near that. Oh but wait, also a possibility is a short it says." I headed home to test out the short theory. I didn't know exactly how, but when no voltage was present from the harness this time around, and checking the resistance about shot the needle out the other side of the multimeter, I figured it was a safe bet that I had shorted her out. Now here's where the plan should have changed; I should have eaten some humble pie, taken her to the mechanic and admitted my mistake so that an expert could charge me $70 per hour and I could help stimulate this horrible economy. But I didn't, and now it will cost me. What I did do is try to find where that harness led to. I figured if I could find the other end of it I could examine whatever it plugged into for damage. In order to get a better view I removed the resistor assembly and started trying to follow where the harness headed, but to no avail. At this point I completely lost focus and thought that maybe if I reset the ECU that would fix the whole problem. So I popped out the backup fuse, put it back in and went to start it up. My car started having seizures. That's right. I had not bolted the resistor assembly back down. Apparently it was crucial for that to be grounded. I bolted it down and managed to start the car...somehow. She was having fits of rage and letting me know how pissed she was that I had inadvertently tazed her. I took her for a walk around the block and noticed a few things wrong, which puts me at my current point.

Current Position:

I fried something. I'm not sure what all depends on that resistor assembly ground, but it looked like just about every part of the wire harness was connected to it. The tach hops around a bit, but only up to 1500 RPM then drops back to zero. The speedometer only works up to about 20mph. The headlights weren't working. The car, when it started after this (it won't start now), ran rough (duh?). And, oh yeah, it's not shifting well at all and when I start out from a dead stop it revs really high and doesn't catch hardly at all until I get it up to 2nd gear speed.

What I Would Like From You:

If you are knowledgeable, please tell me: are we talking second hand ECU and we're good to go? I can get one on eBay for a Benjamin, no big deal. Are we also talking about the circuit board behind the instrument cluster? What a pain to get to that. Or are we talking shorts all over the place and all kinds of toasted sensors and I should go look at leasing a car like my boss suggested?

What I Don't Need:

"Hey man, that sucks!" "You're dumb!" "That's going to be expen$ive!" Thanks for the lip service, but seriously, I really don't need it right now.

Thanks in advance to those who offer a helping hand.

 

first lets start with the basic, have you check any of the fuses that might link you to the short? then check the timing on that too. well what I think is your timing, that has to do a lot with your RPM not being stable. sometime that could be off, if it slightly moved that could completely make your car from starting up. Oh and check your distributor cap it might be crack or got that white dust on the metal part, hope this help.

 

Sounds like the ECU might be in "limp mode"