Starting Problems, Idle Problems, Shuts off

marcelthesuper

Hello,

I have a 1998 CRV that is having a number of running issues. (I live in a South Florida climate, so there is no snow or really cold weather to cause cold start problems.) I would start the car in the mornings and it would run good for a few minutes, but if I don't rev the engine moderately and warm it up for at least 5 minutes, she will shut off after driving for about a minute. There are times that it will not start on the first crank in the morning. It will normally start after a few minutes of on and off cranking.

Also, there are times that it would just shut off while driving. I typically would put her in neutral and she would start. There are times however, when the car will take a long while to start. I seem to have some success when I bang on the throttle body, or tap on the idle control valve. Sometimes the car makes a gurgling sound, would belch and then shut off.

I changed the Throttle Position Sensor, the distributor cap, rotor brush, ignition coil, ignition control module (igniter) and the fuel pressure regulator in recent years. I've had it tuned up recently, cleaned out the throttle body and idle control valve, put in injector cleaner and gas treatment, and these have had little effect.

I wanted to run ODB testing on it, but found out that this particular model does not have an ODB port!!! A number of contributors have suggested changing the ignition switch. There seemed to be a fuel pressure issue, and I changed the fuel tank cap as well as the fuel pump and it ran very well for about a day.

I'm at my wits end and would like some greatly needed help. Thank you.

thecardoc3

I don't know who told you that it wouldn't be an OBDII vehicle, but that is incorrect. Look for the connector on the passengers side of the center console. You have already tossed a number of parts at this and done a lot of "things" in blind attempts to fix "the problem" without spending any real time to prove exactly what the "problems" are first. That kind of an approach rarely works. You really need a qualified technician to work through this and prove what is going on whether you retrieve some codes from the system or not. Even if you do pull some codes, they don't tell you what parts to change or what's really wrong, they only tell you what test that the computer has run has failed.