1995 Accord Dies intermittently

[mark_gober]

Hey everyone,

I'm bowing to the pros in hopes that they impart some wisdom upon me. I'm trying to help my brother's Accord stay running. He's got a 1995 Honda Accord with the 2.2l VTEC engine.

He got a helluva deal on the car ($300) because the previous owner didn't read her owners manual about manually overriding the shift interlock solenoid. We fixed that and it's been working great ever since. Until now......

Recently the vehicle started just dying intermittently. He'll be driving down the road and it'll just die. After much googling, we determined that it HAD to be the distributor, so we replaced it with a reman unit from Autozone for $160. It worked great for about 36 hours and it started dying again.

I brought a timing light and we checked it. When it's doing it, the timing light does not light while the engine is cranking. While we were testing that, we began to notice a new symptom. If he's cranking the engine, it just cranks and cranks with no intent of starting whatsoever, until he releases the key. When he goes from "crank" to "run" on the key, it attempts to stay running and the timing light begins to light. If he taps the lock cylinder while he's cranking, it exhibits similar symptoms.

We googled and saw that it could very be a bad ignition cylinder. He spent another $50 and installed it. It started right up and idled for a few minutes and then died again. We are really getting frustrated.

The guy at Autozone (who says he used to work at a Honda shop) thinks we should look at getting another distributor because it was a reman and might have just had the same problem. That's easy enough to do, but what are the chances?

So in conclusion this is what we are looking....

1995 Honda accord that won't stay reliably running.
When it dies, it dies quickly and typically doesn't restart immediately.
While it's misbehaving, we have no spark on any cylinders.
The distributor and the lock cylinder have been replaced.
Brother has removed and resolders connections on main relays under the dash.
Car's aftermarket alarm system has been completely disabled by removing the fuses that power the system.

Can anyone give us any direction to go? I'm leaning toward a possible ECU replacement, but that is a substantial cost and I'm looking to avoid any further useless expenditures.

I'm looking forward to any thoughts/suggestions you may have to keep this beast on the road.

Mark

[hunter01]

98 Honda Accord just started doing the same thing this week.
Replaced battery checked dist cap,looked good,no codes. Cat needs to be replaced but not source of problem.
Mechanic test drove and couldn't replicate the problem. Said he's seen this before on similar year make, said could be ignition switch but he couldn't be sure. Since he doesn't know what the problem is he didn't charge me anything and sent me home.