Idle air control valve and high mileage maintenance.
So i started going through various components in my engine bay and inspecting them. I have 150k on my insight now and figured it was time to make sure everything was going ok. I took my intake manifold off and cleaned my egr passages again. I cleaned my intake manifold and removed my throttle body. I noticed a couple of things. Firstly there is a casting on the inlet side of the throttle body that collects oil or carbon. There was a bunch of black sooty looking stuff clumped up on the hard casting flash. So before i ground that down and made it smooth i took off the idle air control valve. I noticed something interesting. There is a gasket in there. It was very close to failure. It was hard and caked with hard coolant crusties. It looked like it had actually been leaking just a little for a little while now. So i replaced that gasket and saved myself a really crappy failure in the near future. I then took the time to smooth out that casting. I have no idea if it will lead to any gains but it was far from perfect and i have to tools to correct that.
The other thing i took a good look at was the vtec solenoid or spool valve. There is a gasket that seals of 3 chambers. The bottom chamber has a metal screen impregnated into the gasket. I took that all off and apart and cleaned it out. there were small metal debris trapped in the filter. So they were cleaned and removed. They are a normal result of engine operation for 150k and just get trapped in there. So i got them all out and cleaned out the screen.
After all of the cleaning and modification and the installation of a new knock sensor i can definitely say that my car is running much better and has a noticeable increase in power.
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