I have an '06 with what seems like a serious issue and I need a shop with the skill, integrity and professionalism to trust to work on my baby. It'll probably involve removing the head and a head rebuild. Where do I take it? Salem Honda and Paul Nix? AR in Lake O? Somewhere else? I just want it fixed right. Thanks in advance for any help.

 

"Serious issue?" What happened?

-- Chuck

 

As far as I'm concerned the ONLY place is Paul Nix at Salem Honda's. I had a weep in my head gasket last summer and was glad that he was there to take care of me. He fixed it properly and I haven't worried about it since. There may be others as good out there somewhere, but I doubt it. I can only hope that he's available for years to come.

Dean Roberts
'08 NFR with 169,000 miles and counting.
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I had a cooling fan issue a year or two ago. It did overheat once and got quite hot couple of other times. Then, I was getting a bit of a coolant smell on occasion when I started the car in the garage, (smell more concentrated). I put uv dye in the coolant to see if I could find any leaks, but no. I tested compression and got crazy good and consistent compression. I scoped the cylinders (twice) to look for issues. I saw what MAY have been coolant on a piston top.

I then had dark smoke with no oil smell, and it was overall running rich. That eventually went away as well. So with all of that info, I thought that the overheating very well may have cause a head gasket problem and was planning to address. For a while, I've been struggling with a lumpy idle and rarely, the car dying at low idle. Just not wanting to idle correctly.

And about two weeks ago, drive it for about five minutes to run to a store and pulling in to the parking lot, it started running horribly. Bucking, rattling, sounded like perhaps two cylinders were missing. And then what sounded like backfiring with a metallic pinging sound with each bang, though the bangs were muffled. Scary sounds. So, I drive it home. It runs smoothly above 3800 RPMs, but horrible again at anything less. So I can't think it's rods, bearings or retainers or anything like that.

I scope the cylinders again and #4 looks pretty black and the plug from that cylinder was much more degraded than the others. So I start thinking about what all may be the problem. It's closing in on 150k miles, with a lot of things still factory installed, so I decide to swap out the injectors (assuming the rich running and black cylinder and plug is indicative of injector issues). And swapped the original coil packs for new ones. And a new MAP sensor. and new plugs, gapped perfectly. And go to start it and the exact same thing happens. Still.

SO now I assume that the overheating did damage. To what extent I don't know. And I looked at the valve train and scoped all the cylinders and didn't see anything scary internally. But the super rough running is just too much for me to figure out at this point.

Any ideas are welcomed. And I'm copying to the under the hood page.