Wow, can't believe I had not checked this yet. 3/4in play in mine but I didn't adjust it yet. I want to do a back to back comparison but the weather is really crappy outside so I will wait for the weekend (not a daily driver)

I can see this will have an affect on response, but what about WOT? I'm trying to picture this in my head, wouldn't this make it so at full throttle it may not be fully open?

 

My throttle cable has a lot of slack. I tried to adjust it tighter but the throttle would hit the stop way before the pedal hit the floor (about an inch of travel remaining). I then adjusted it so that it the pedal is about 1/8" inch from the floor when the throttle hits the stop. Does this mean that I need a new cable?

 

Think about it. The ratio of how quickly the throttle opens to how far down the pedal is relates to the profile of the cam the throttle cable rides in, which is attached to the throttle body (or attached to the black box on dbw cars). It has nothing to do with cable slack or cable 'wear'. Once the pedal is down far enough to remove any cable slack, each mm of additional pedal travel relates to X degrees of throttle rotation, based on the profle of that throttle body cable cam.

So if the throttle is fully open before the pedal hits floor, you can either adjust for pedal at floor = throttle just reaching fully open, or adjust for no play, or something in between.

If you want both, you'd either need to alter the shape of that cam thing, adjust where cable attaches to pedal so ount of cable pull to pedal travel is altered, both of which would be quite difficult, or just limit pedal travel so it hits floor, or something on the floor, right at full throttle open, which would be comparatively easy.

 

Thank you. Yes, I do understand all of that. I was considering putting something on the cam or perhaps a small block of wood under the pedal. I assumed that if most people seemed to not have the issue I described above there were 2 possibilities-either my cable is out of spec somehow, or others are adjusting so that the throttle body is fully open well before the pedal hits the floor. The second situation seems unsafe as it probably wouldn't take very long for a heavy foot to snap the cable. I didn't see anywhere to adjust the cable at either end, only the nuts holding the end of the cable sleeve near the throttle body. I don't really like the idea of a makeshift solution as they have a tendency to fail; I'd rather not be stranded and I typically don't travel with a navigator to work the throttle while I drive

 

I know this thread is pretty old but I just wanted to touch on this point. The throttle cable is actually pretty clever on this car. If you get down under the dash and look at where the cable attaches to the pedal, you'll notice that the cable has a rubber bushing (mimics a spring) between the cable end and the pedal. What this means is that you CAN actually remove ALL the play at the engine side (as long as it returns to idle properly) without causing undue stress to the cable or anything that attaches to it. When you push the pedal in slowly you'll feel it, but you can keep pushing it through the resistance of the rubber all the way to the pedal stop, it's still full throttle since the throttle body sets the end travel. Once you get past that point the pedal basically moves independently of the cable.

 

To emphasize this point, the fear expressed by previous post that cable might snap is completely mitigated by this clever design. Once throttle is fully open, any additional foot to floor pedal pressure is just going to further compress that rubber stopper, not put any significant extra stress on the cable.

What this translates to while driving is once you feel that extra resistance in the pedal near the floor, there is nothing extra gained by pressing through that all the way to the floor. But nothing lost either, no damage.

 

There's required slack in the cable at idle. My shop manual is at home, though, so I can't quote it but it's there.

-- Chuck

 

Right, zero slack is ok so long as the throttle can reliably return to its stop. The problem is with temp changes the cable can be tighter than when you adjusted it. Then there would be not enough slack. Hence the spec for slack. They have you dial in enough to compensate for temp.

 

Thank you! This is exactly the info I needed

 

Honda shop manual:

4mm - 6mm slack in throttle cable is required. 3/16 to 1/4 inch. As noted above be sure the throttle opens fully with the pedal to the floor.

-- Chuck