Rick Hesel

To make a long story short, I took my car to Heritage Honda in Townsend to fix a problem with a trouble code realting to cold-air injection. Not only did they not fix this problem, but when I got the car back, it had a new set of trouble codes, all relating to misfires (401, 401, 403, and 404).

I fixed the cold-air issue myself (it was a split vacuum hose). What it god's name could the dealer have done? BTW, avoid Heritage like the plague. Their service department stinks and they were rude to me when I complained about what they had done (and I was a very good customer, having bought or leased 5 or 6 Hondas from them over the past ten years). They've lost me as a customer forever.

suzukatim at Scott Honda (where my tranny was very ably fixed) thought it might be the VAFC making the mixture too lean, so he set all the settings back to stock. No luck -- the codes are still popping up. Before I subject the car to another local Honda dealer (Scott is too far to go for this), anybody have an idea of what might be going on? The procedures in the Helm manual for tracking the problem are quite long, and I thought someone might already have had experience with this problem that might prove helpful.

hondaS2001

first off, do you have any idea whatsoever at what your settings were at when you left it there? And secondly, do you have any idea what mileage/kilometers (even to the tenth) what your car had on it when you left it? Im guessing maybe, just maybe someone either fooled around with the vafc and/or joyrided it? If you leave the car somewhere its a good idea to reset one of the trip meters and then you can tell, however, this wont detect them revving the motor at idle. I met a member who had a beeping device installed somehow and it would beep a certain amount of times to tell you what the engine was last revved to, for cases like this. Hopefully this is not the case, but if you didnt have any problems with it for a while, then it would be hard to think why not? Sad, but true, that there have been a lot of cases with techs messing around in s2k's, and Ive even heard of one where they messed around with the settings on the VAFC then joyrided the car, so hopefully they didnt do this with yours....

hondaS2001

btw, did you pull up the codes yourself or did someone else do it for you? There is another member who posted not too long after/before you and was having misfires but their codes were in the early 300's

Slows2k

Misfire DTC's are P0301-P0304. The cheapest and easiest thing to check is a set of spark plugs. I would get a set of non platinum plugs and go from there.

turbo_pwr

But he said the codes were 401-404. Anyway I think it might be an 02 sensor problem.

Slows2k

P0401 is EGR insufficient flow. The S has no EGR, So I'm pretty sure Rick just mixed up the #'s .Most likely if an O2 was causing misfires it would have an 02 code as well.

airgate

Rick, I don't know much on the codes and their meaning, but my S2000 recently shot out codes before Fall Colors and I had the spark plugs replaced. The codes stopped. However, after returning from Fall Colors, the codes returned. Ended up being the fuel injector as Cylinder #1 was misfiring. Since the fuel injector was replaced, my S2000 is back to normal. No longer sputtering at idle and sounds great.

Of course, I had about 56k miles at the time. Not sure what your issue could be.

Slows2k

There are multiple causes of misfires. Spark plugs, injectors, coil packs, fuel contamination (water and diesel doesn't burn well in a gas engine) P0300= random misfire P0301 misfire on #1, P0302 =#2, P0303= #3. P0304=#4. If you have the service manual, just follow the steps in the book, Honda service manuals do a really good job with toubleshooting.

Rick Hesel

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Slows2k
There are multiple causes of misfires. Spark plugs, injectors, coil packs, fuel contamination (water and diesel doesn't burn well in a gas engine)

Colin

What a coincidence, my 2001 started idling rough a few thousand miles ago. I had the valves adjusted last week just to see if the intake valves had tightened up. Not the case. A few days later, my car spit up a code #303. The tech who did my valve adjustment here at our Acura store pulled the code with our machine. He went back to have a look at his work just to be sure he didn't make a mistake. No problems with his work. He then swapped the ignition coil on #3 with #2. (the 303 code means cylinder #3) We were hoping to find the problem had moved to #2 thus identifying the ignition coil as the cause. Unfortunately the problem jumped to cylinder #1 (code 301) Now have have to take it and leave it at our sister Honda store since it's a warranty repair. I'll keep you posted. BTW, FWIW, the car seems to run fine at high RPMs it's just idling real rough and fuel economy seems REALLY bad.