Hello,

I have a 1998 Honda Civic DX that I recently purchased a week ago. It has 195,000 miles on it. When I purchased the car, it was low on oil by about 2 1/2 quarts and the coolant was in bad shape. I immediately, drained and replaced the oil and flushed the cooling system (which was 90% water), bled the lines and everything was seemingly working fine.

This past Saturday, I was taking the car around the block, essentially checking for more things to be wrong with it, and about 10 minutes into the drive, the idle rpm doubled. Seemingly, when I came to a stop it felt like I still had my foot on the accelerator, but that was not the case. I bring the car back to my house to find that there is a smell of burning oil and under the hood it had been smoking. (It was smoking from the rear of the motor and I assume the smoke from coming from oil hitting the exhaust.)

My question to the community would be; what might have caused this and are these symptoms indicative of a common, known problem? I don't want to replicate the symptoms just to potentially cause more harm then good. Any thoughts? I wasn't getting any spikes in temperature on the dash cluster as well as the diagnostics tool I had connected at the time. I was just watching the digital tach as the car does not have one.