My son and I recently replaced the manual tranny on his 96 Honda Accord w/VTEC with a U-Pull-It tranny. Everything went fine till the radiator cracked about a month later. So, he replaced the radiator. A few days later he had a hose leak on the idle sensor so he fixed that. It ran great for 1 day. Then it intermittently started bodging down when he shifted gears and tried to accelerate. We suspected either fuel distribution or ignition. It just got worse from there. He now tells me the only way he can get it to move is to ride the clutch and hi rev the engine else it stalls. He now suspects the tranny is going bad. It's still under warranty. I'm 300 miles away and would hate to drive that far, to replace the tranny, just to find it's something else (vacuum leak, shorted plug wire, fuel filter, etc). Can anyone help us troubleshoot the problem? Is there a way to confirm the tranny is or is not going out. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

if its not LS (limited slip) jack up one tire put the car in neutral and see if its easy to spin if so have someone put it in gear and hold the clutch and turn the wheel if its easy to turn in all gears its fine if u have a bad wheel bearing or a sticking caliper? or break cylinder any grinding noise comeing from the tranny?

 

Low coolant has caused erratic idle for me before.

 

yeah theres a difference between bogging and poor idling. un bled coolant will cause poor idling.

bogging is caused by any number of problems.... fuel, timing, spark. How does it rev in neutral? any check engine lights?

 

Thanks for the comments guys. After some long discussions I finally got my son to get the error codes. It ends up that the distributor cap and ignition rotor were bad. Replaced the cap and rotor, and it seems to be working fine. However, when he went to replace the cap and rotor he discovered it has a non-vtec distributor on a vtec engine. Does this matter?

Again thanks for the comments

 

shouldn't matter a bit the internals are the same

 

Thanks, I wasn't sure. There must be something else wrong with this car. Because, it started acting up again. My son has decided to take it to a mechanic. He's just too impatient to go through the steps to resolve the issues. Personally, I think he has a wiring issue, broke, shorted, or corroded. But, it's his problem and I'd like to thank all you guys for the help.