96 Civic Idle Speed

The ignition coil is contained within the distributer on my 96 Civic EX. Is
there another point to hook up a standard tachometer for idle speed
adjustment? Or, am I needing to buy an inductive type (hopefully not too
expensive)? Suggestions?

Thanks.

Scott

 

Scott,
If you've ruled out the thermovalve, and you're sure the coolant is
full, and purged of air, there shouldn't be any need to adjust the idle,
should there? Are you sure there's no vacuum leaks??

'Curly'

---------------

 

Honda usually puts a service connector somewhere under the hood for
connection of a tachometer. It has three wires: Ground, battery and tach
signal. On mine the wire for the tach signal is blue.

 

Fast idle was pushing 2000 rpm. Warm idle was about 1000 rpm and somewhat
erratic (this is a new car for me, so I don't know how stable this should be
with the miles it's got, 115k). I checked for vacuum leaks and found none,
although they can be elusive. Throttle body was replace by previous owner
recently.

I adjusted the warm idle down to 750 rpm or so by the dashboard tach, the
cold idle is still around 1500.

Per the Helm manual, cold idle should be raised between 150 and 300 rpm; so
it should be about 1000 rpm max.

Given that there is a distinguishable cold vs warm idle, I'm thinking the
coolant temp sensor is good (although my next check is to disconnect and
observe open and shorted behavior). (Coolant and cooling system is fine,
btw.)

Which leads me to suspect the Idle Air Control valve. Don't know what else
is left.

But, I figured I'd want to get a better adjustment on the warm idle at some
point.

 

Great, just the sort of reply I'd hoped for . Now, to find it ...

 

Found it. Just where Helms said it was.