92 honda accord

I have a 1992 Honda Accord and when it gets warm it cuts off.I can be
driving just fine down the road and it just cuts off after getting warmed
up of after about 8 miles or so.After that it won't start back up until I
let it sit for awhile ( and hour or so) and cool down I have been told
alot of things that it could be but no one is exactly for sure on any of
those. Does anybody have any suggestions?

 

This is the classic symptom of famous cold solder joint on the main relay
problem.

Andrew

 

Sounds like the igniter.

The Main Relay does not cause this problem.

 

From my reading and experience, this is the classic symptom
of a bad ignition coil. As they age and and near death, they
get very persnickety with temperature cycles, like the one
you describe below.

There are a few checks you can do of the coil. See
www.autozone.com 's free online manuals for your car.

Igniters tend to fail all or nothing.

Main relays don't cause shutdown while running.

www.tegger.com/hondafaq also has some checks you can do of
the coil, under running/starting problems. Or word search
for "coil."

 

The main relay on my 1993 Accord sure did cause my car to
stop running. I was typically able to restart it in a few
attempts after coasting to the side of the road. The problem
went away after my mechanic resoldered the main relay. The
problem more commonly manifested itself as the inablilty to
start the hot car after stopping for a few minutes.

Andrew

 

Noted, though my 91 Civic's main relay never failed while I
drove the car. For a few months, I put up with the
"non-start after driving a hot car and stopping for a few
minutes" deal. A new main relay fixed it right up. (Though
re-soldering is said to be just as effective.)

Tegger's site (which often, but not always, denotes some
group consensus) notes: "Once the car does start and run,
the relay seems to be able to maintain the connection even
with cracked solder, and keep the car running. I'm not sure
why."

Yours may have been a perfectly probablistic exception,
though.

 

Could be the coil too.

How to check:
http://www.tegger.com/hondafaq/startproblems.html#bad

A "dwell meter" is also known as an "engine analyzer". Availaible
everywhere.

 

That's decidedly rare. Usually keeps working once the car's running.

 

AFAIC, that helps. Said "engine analyzer" is available at
Autozone for a digital version, $80. Available at Ebay,
bidding is at $10 at the moment for a Sears Craftsman
(older?) version that clearly has "dwell" noted on its dial
knob. No idea what the quality of either of these is, but if
the guts of this isn't much more sophisticated than a
digital multimeter, I figure one can't go too wrong with a
cheap engine analyzer. Looks like fun, too...

 

This is exactly the symptom my '96 Odyssey exhibited when the ignition
switch went bad.

 

They were more common in the latter days of points-and-condenser ignition.
Once you preset your points gap to .018", you then fine-tuned it by
checking the dwell angle (hence the name "dwell meter"). You might have to
close the gap up a touch or widen it to make sure the coil was getting
properly saturated.

I fried two cheap dwell meters in 1981. At that same time, I was also
unable to determine why I was suffering severe points burning in addition
to the dwell meter failures (but didn't then know the two were related). It
seems the aftermarket coil that was on the car when I bought it had been
installed upside-down. IOW, the + and - terminals had been swapped. Easily
done, since the terminals were not marked! The garage only discovered it
when they put the car on an oscilloscope as a last resort, and saw that the
sine wave was upside-down.

 

Except when the switch goes bad it usually does not have anything to do with
the heat of the car... but rather with the jiggling of the ignition switch.
We had that too... while driving. I logged it on the NHTSA site and included
a link to a website where I and others had logged our experiences.... 6 or
so months later there was a recall.

 

In my experience, when the switch went bad, it had to do with the heat of
the switch, not anything else. As it got progressively worse, the stalls
happened sooner and sooner until you couldn't get it from the street to the
garage without a couple of waits and restarts. Jiggling the switch had
absolutely no effect on it with mine. You had to wait for the contacts
inside to cool down.

Its easy to check - two little Phillips screws remove it from the back of
the key cylinder, pop it open and look. Burned contacts are obvious when
you see them.