PDA

View Full Version : My accord doesn't like the rain, please help?



l75eya
06-17-2008, 02:44 PM
Hi, I have an 87 dx, and aside from shifting into drive very roughly sometimes, it hasn't given me a single damn problem since i've owned it.
I went down the shore (Yes us jersey people actually do say that=D) the other day, it's about a 200 mile round trip. The drive there was absolutely uneventful, but when I got back on the parkway to come home, it started POURING. I don't mean just raining, I mean heavy heavy heavy heavy rain and lightning and this lasted without letting up the entire journey back home.
By the time I was almost home, after driving in pouring rain for about an hour, I noticed my tachometer kept intermittently dropping to zero, but the engine was still running, and a short while after that my brake light started coming on and going out and glowing dark and then brightening up, which led me to believe something electrical that isn't supposed to get wet was beginning to get wet. about 5 minutes later the engine started bucking if I let off the gas a bit, and eventually I came to some traffic so I let my foot off the gas and the car stalled. Pulled over to the shoulder, started it back up and it stalled again. The only way I got back on the highway was to keep my foot on the gas and one foot on the brake if I needed to slow down.
Anyway, days later, my car is still running like shit. It will not really idle at all. I was wondering where exactly the idle adjustment screw is on the carb, I found two screws that I played with to no avail, one on the driver's side (which I think is a vacuum advance adj.) and another on the passenger side which I don't know if it's the idle or the a/f mixture. Either way, fucking with those really hasn't helped at all.
When I start the car when it's cold it will rev really high, because I have no tach, I'm guessing it revs to about 3500 - 4k, and eventually the engine speed will lower as the car warms up and as it does this it will stall if the revs drop to around 1200 or so.
If I drive the car like this (keeping one foot on the brake and gas so it won't stall) and it gets up to operating temperature it won't stall but it comes damn near close to it and strains to run for a few seconds sputtering and shaking, then jumps up to around 2k rpm and then bogs down and sputters again.
Basically I'm looking for any suggestions and I was wondering if somebody could tell me where the cold idle adjustment is and the regular idle adjustment, and what those two screws I mentioned before are. Any ideas anybody? Could it just be a sensor that got shorted out by the rain?The help is greatly appreciated. I never had any problems with the idle before driving it in the heavy rain.

Thanks a bunch in advance!

greentee76
06-17-2008, 04:26 PM
The two screws you messed with are more than likely A/C idle boost(driverside) and cold idle adjustment screw(passenger side).
The idle adjustment screw is a large black thumbknob on the back of the carb on the passengerside.(conviently buried under vacuum lines).
Usually a dead tach is an indication of a distributer getting ready to fail or possibly a coil. I would imagine you got some water in the dizzy and you might be able to pull the cap off and dry it out with some compressed air.
That is wheere I would start and check and make sure you have clean and dry connections between dizzy and coil.
Hope this helps. Good luck with it.