Ok I have an Autometer A/F guage on my car and lately it has been giving some very erratic readings. Sometimes it will read lights all over the guage and sometimes it will cycle only between lean and stoich or only in lean when just cruising. It seems like the guage is working imporperly. Are Autometer A/F guages known to do this? I mean my A/F guage was working pretty well until a couple weeks ago when it started givng erratic readings. Could it be my motor that is messed up and the autometer guage is giving a proper reading?

 

o2 sensor could be going. mine (not auto meter some german digital thing) will not display anything under light throttle or during breaking. idle it does reving it does and putting the hammer on it, it will as well. under light crusing it wont show a thing. mine will go from stoich to lean as well during crusing some times. what happens is once you start crusing voltage from o2 drops to nothing and you dont get any readings. doesnt mean your running lean. just means the o2 isnt doing anything at all.

 

Also when I go WOT sometimes the guage will display rich, sometimes in stoich, and on rare occasions it will just stay in lean. I seriously think my guage is malfunctioning. Either that or my o2 sensor. Also, you think it could be because I have a test pipe and the reading from the secondary o2 is messing with the reading form the primary o2 sensor?

 

your primary and seccondary o2s are independant from each other. neither one affects each other only the ecu. try getting a new sensor

 

i've noticed this too in several hondas. if you go to the autometer homepage and look under the tech tips they show an animated gif of the gauge bouncing around like that. here is their explanation of it
"Since the oxygen sensor output is non-liner and very sensitive at the stoichiometric A/F ratio it will cause the A/F meter LED's to bounce back and forth rapidly. A very small change in A/F ratio causes a large change in oxygen sensor voltage as can be seen on the graph. This causes the A/F ratio meter LED's to rapidly cycle back and forth, and is normal operation when the PCM is in closed loop and trying to maintain a stoichiometric A/F ratio." < c/p from their web sight. taken off a much longer explanation. personaly i hate the bouncing lights. i want a good analog afr gauge but the only good ones i can find cost something around $140 or so.
hope that helped you out there dude



[Modified by snail, 10:39 AM 5/5/2002]