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After chasing my tail for several weeks I am looking for some advice. Vehicle is a 99 Honda Civic EX Auto Trans with 1.6L D16Y8 engine. Several symptoms appeared all at once. (1) After the car sits for a couple days it will start and run for about a minute before stalling. Then I have to wait for a couple of minutes and it will start again and run just fine. As long as I start the car everyday then there is no problem, but if it sits for a day or two then the symptom reappears. (2) Car overheats after driving at freeway speeds for about 30 min. (3) Catalytic converter rattling and had a rainbow color to it like it was getting red hot.
What I have done…
Symptom (1): I only drive this car to work Mon-Thurs and it sits all weekend. So basically every Monday I stall in almost the exact same spot leaving my neighborhood. It is difficult because I only have a couple of minutes each Monday to witness the problem. Initially I thought it was going to be fuel related… either pressure or contamination, but I ruled those out. Turns out I am not getting any spark. Today I am going to pull of the distributor cap and rotor to check those out. I am thinking that this is unrelated to symptoms (2) and (3) and was coincidence that they occurred at the same time.
Symptom (2): I popped my radiator about 6months ago and so I replaced it. Temperatures looked good when I am driving down the road, but one day I noticed that after a 40 min freeway drive the temp gauge started to climb to the top as I was exiting the off ramp, but not completely overheating. My coolant was low and no visible leaks so I figured that I hadn’t bled the system enough when R&R’d the radiator. I topped it off and drove it around for about an hour before calling it good. Then a couple of days later the same problem comes back…. temps are ok until I am getting off the freeway. I am thinking it is inefficient circulation, but that doesn’t make sense since I just replaced the water pump about a year ago and what are the chances of the new radiator being plugged up??
Symptom(3): The catalytic converter was rattling bad so I new it was toast… Also it through an efficiency code. I pulled it out and it had a rainbow color to it like it had been heating up for a while. It has been replaced and the code is gone. I have been monitoring the temperature of the cat, but have not seen anything unusual.My biggest concern are symptoms (2) and (3). I am assuming they are related. I worry that I am gonna burn up another cat or worse? What could be causing this? Could the overheating be causing the catalytic failure or vice versa… or is there some other underlying problem that is causing both of these symptoms? I was thinking that maybe the low antifreeze levels caused some sort of lean air/fuel ratio and that is was burned up the cat, but I am getting no codes for lean/air fuel ratios. Any suggestions on how to proceed? I am going to try and address that spark issue tonight… might as well start solving some of the known problems. Any ideas on how to check out a water pump without removing belts?
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Did you bleed the cooling system of ALL the air? As in did the fan come on, it dropped in temp and then you increased the rpms to have it come on a 2nd time?
Please watch Eric’s how to bleed a cooling system video and ensure you get ALL the air out. Some pockets can stay resident for a long time if bleeding is done improperly.
Yes, I did bleed the system correctly. Yesterday I took the car out for a 40 min drive. I drove about 20min on freeway followed by 20 min on surface streets. I could not get it to overheat so I drove back home. As I was pulling into my neighborhood it finally started to heat up. The gauge climbed nearly to the top… I was trying to get a coolant temp but couldn’t find my scanner at the time. I cranked the heater and parked in my driveway to check for leaks as I let the car run. No leaks except a small amount of boil over from the overflow tank. After about 5 min of idling the temp returned to normal. I shut the car off and after cool down I checked to make sure the coolant level was still ok and it was. I am starting to think that I have a circulation problem, but that is frustrating since the radiator, thermostat, water pump and even the temp sending unit are only about a year old. I had to rebuild my transmission about a year ago, so when I pulled the engine and tranny I took the opportunity to put a new seal kit on the engine and a new timing kit.
engine fan turns on after the coolant temps reach about 200F and then turns off again once temps drop below 200F. I checked this out when I was bleeding the coolant system.
OK so I checked the thermostat operation and it was good so I put it back and filled up the system with coolant again. I was bleeding the system and after 3 fan cycles I noticed that the bubbles were still coming up. I ran it for another 5 fan cycles and still saw bubbles. When I bring the rpm’s up the bubbles get really small and the coolant looks almost milky. I think that I am getting a combustion leak into the coolant system. Anyone have experience with this? Is this usually just a bad head gasket? I hope so, but I do not see any oil in the coolant. I hope it is not a cracked head. I am going to do a leak down on each cylinder and see if I can get bubbles to come up the radiator. Any other tests I can perform here?
If combustion is leaking into the cooling system does that mean that I may also have coolant leaking into the exhaust? I am still trying to explain the bad catalytic converter. Oh, maybe I forgot to mention this, but the I replaced the cat about a year ago so that is why I am so concerned about it going bad. Especially since it had a rainbow color to it when i took it out.
Overheating problem solved. I did a leak down test on each cylinder and found bubbles coming up through the radiator when testing cylinder 1. Pulled the head off and I could see the damaged head gaskets where the leak had been occurring. Also I found the head was warped. I had it resurfaced and now that it’s all back together I am getting no more bubbles in the cooling system.
I am still concerned about why the catalytic converter burned up. The engine was overheating, but not significantly. The gauge never quite made it to red. Can a catalytic converter burn up just from overheating? What about if coolant had been getting into the exhaust system? I don’t see how this could burn up a cat either.
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