Jim Mowreader

I have a 1986 Accord LX-I with manual transmission.

When the car is cold, it starts fine, and it always runs fine. It likes
to idle at 2000rpm sometimes, but there's no hesitation or weirdness in
its operation.

When the car is warmed up, it will crank and crank and crank for quite
some time before it starts...kinda like running out a flood on a car
with a carburetor.

A strange one: if you push-start the car when it's warm, it fires right
up. But I totally trashed the left inner CV--tearing a hole in the oil
pan in the process--when I did that once, so no more of that.

So I thought, if I pull the fuel pump fuse and crank the engine, maybe
it will start. Pull the fuse, the car runs for about three
seconds...which is all you'd expect to get. Stick the fuse back in, car
sometimes starts and sometimes does not. But you do the fuse in-out
thing, and eventually the car starts.

As an experiment, I bought a 30-amp automotive switch from RadioShack
and wired it into the fuel pump fuse circuit. This works pretty
well...if you turn the fuel pump on, crank the car for a few seconds,
then turn the fuel pump off, it fires. Immediately start pumping the gas
and turning the pump on and off, and within 20 seconds the car will be
running. And like I said, once it is running it runs great.

I think my coolant-temperature sensor (aka "thermowax sensor") is
screwed up, always reporting that the engine is cold. This device
probably only gets read at startup--if the engine's cold, dump more gas
in and it will fire right up; if you dump more gas in when it's hot the
engine floods. I'm thinkin' the mixture-enrichment cycle only lasts
about ten to fifteen seconds because once I'm out of that period, the
engine runs stably in a very short period of time.

I've already changed the fuel injector seals, and they needed it. I
changed the thermostat because the car liked to overheat, and that also
seemed to make it start a little easier. Would it be good to start
hitting junkyards looking for a new thermowax sensor? I know the dealer
price on one will be astronomical.

--jm