hello everyone, the car is a 1997 civic ex, d16y8. Its my friends car...now we recently swapped the car from auto to manual. After some trans problems we got it running. But he also did a wire tuck and the cars been having some problems.
Sorry about how long this is going to be. So it started out that the car had about 5 or so CELs. i can't remember all of them, but map,O2, vtec oil pressure, and i think one of the coolant sensors were throwing codes. About 3 weeks ago we fixed it all and got all the codes to go away. He had been driving it with no vtec for about a month and then once we fixed the oil pressure sensor he got back the vtec and was able to get the rpms above 5500 or whatever vtec engages at.
Drove it around for a few days after vtec was hooked up and got into it because he finally could. Then one night he said as he would try to accelerate it would bog down as he got higher into the RPMs. first it would start bogging at 7k then at 6k and then he couldn't even get it to 5. he could hardly get it up to 35mph in a quarter mile. Took it home and shut the car off. he said the timing belt felt loose so we redid it made it tight and tried to start it.

Now here is the confusing part. The car will not start. it will crank. it has good spark and yes it has fuel. fuel coming out of the injectors. i believe it is too much fuel because the first crank the car sputters but dies. Then if you pull out the injector wires it will start for about 5 seconds... We pulled the fuel rail off, put on know good injectors and same thing. we have swapped dizzys with a know good one.same thing. we also swapped multiple ecus. a know good ecu that is the same as his did the same thing. But i have a chipped p28 that i hooked up just to see, and it started the car. It ran like crap and you couldn't accelerate but thats the same thing it does in my stock car... At this point i am just lost. there are no CELs and we have tried everything twice it seems like. If anyone has any help it would be greatly appreciated.

 

YOUR CAT IS CLOGGED!!!!!!! take off the headers and try to start it

 

double check the timing!

 

both of these are possible... However if you do decide to run the car with the HEADER off i wouldnt do it for long especially during this time of year... you run the risk of burning valves this way.

 

we have checked the timing at least 3 times and also adjusted the valve lash stuff just to be safe..but i will tell him about the cat.. How would that make it dump too much fuel?

 

If the O2 sensor in the cat is damaged or worn out, it could send the wrong message to the computer as to what the make up of the exhaust gasses looks like.
Too much Nitrogen, too little Oxygen, etc or a bad reading making the computer think these things are happening, making it richen the fuel mixture to the point that it basically floods the motor and it can't fire correctly.
(same could happen with the upstream O2 sensor, which has a bigger hand in the fuel rich/lean mixture than the downstream one)

If either is whacked up, then it could cause the car to run like crap.
Or as said above, the cat might be clogged really badly, preventing the exhaust gas from escaping and pulling new combustible air into the motor.

Only other think I can think of is if your Crankshaft positioning sensor is crapped out and the ECU therefore has no sense of the engine timing, keeping it from firing and potentially blowing itself up (which would also happen with the Camshaft positioning sensor, but since that's in the distributor and you already checked that....)

Other than that, I'm stumped ^^;

 

thank you very much for the replies. i will be going today to try and check all these things aNd ill post back later tonight

 

well thank you all for the help. we pulled the cat off and there was black stuff that fell out all over. the car started right up with no problems. i really appreciate it. this car has been giving me a headache the past month.

 

best to just bust a hole thru the cat and buy a new one when u have to get thru emissions or use a sparkplug defouler to trick the ecu the cat is still working properly as it moves the o2 away from the main exhaust stream.

 

Sucks you bought all those parts for it, when all you had to do was take the cat off. I hate it when that happens, makes me so mad. Glad to hear you got it started though!

 

Hey instead of busting a hole through the cat, get a high quality replacement, that way, the car runs good, and you're legal and helping the environment somewhat
I recommend Magnaflow:

http://www.procivic.com/pages-produc...513/index.html

You can probably find a better price out there though
^^;

 

 

i got a random technology hi flow on my car and haven't had problems with mine in years. but cheapest route would be to do what i said a defouler is only like 25 bux. a new cat is like 150-250 bux