Somewhere around Aug.1990 I purchased a used 1986 Honda Accord EX from a friend(my 1977 Buick was on it's last leg and my auto technology professor at the school I was attending at the time took it off my hands...thank God). The Honda was an all around decent car with 68,000miles on it when I bought it. I pretty much drove it everywhere and kept it reasonably maintained either by me doing the work or having my local garage do some of the service work on it.At or around 1997, the a/c system started acting up ...here's what went on... when the outside air temp. was 80 degrees or higher, the compressor would cycle normally for about 10 minutes( I would watch the tachometer as the car idled and observed a slight drop in rpms as the system "cycled ON' and a slight rise in the engine's rpms as th compressor "cycled OFF". The readings never went above the factory specs of 900 rpms during this 10 minute period. After what I estimate to be around 15 minutes or so, (the vehicle is parked and idling as it has been) the compressor cycles in the OFF mode and the engine rpms jump up to around 2500 rpms.When the system cycles back ON, the engine speed drops down to around 1500rpms(obviously WAY out of specs, wouldn't you say?). I discovered this little malfunction one day as I was driving the car, and it suddenly became damn hard to bring the car to a stop(I had to shift the transmission into neutral to take the engine out of the equation. To relieve this problem I would shut the car off and leave it sit for anywhere from 5 to 7 minutes Re-starting the vehicle at this point everything returned to normal and I could drive and stop the car in a normal manner.
None of these symptoms occured if the temp. outside was under 80 degrees F. Pretty weird,huh? There wasn't any of the local shops(not even the honda dealer) that could duplicate this problem...and I know that I wasn't imagining all of this. This car went to the dealer that I bought my volkswagen from as a trade-in. The honda had 255,000 miles on it when I let it go.
Somewhere around Aug.1990 I purchased a used 1986 Honda Accord EX from a friend(my 1977 Buick was on it's last leg and my auto technology professor at the school I was attending at the time took it off my hands...thank God). The Honda was an all around decent car with 68,000miles on it when I bought it. I pretty much drove it everywhere and kept it reasonably maintained either by me doing the work or having my local garage do some of the service work on it.At or around 1997, the a/c system started acting up ...here's what went on... when the outside air temp. was 80 degrees or higher, the compressor would cycle normally for about 10 minutes( I would watch the tachometer as the car idled and observed a slight drop in rpms as the system "cycled ON' and a slight rise in the engine's rpms as th compressor "cycled OFF". The readings never went above the factory specs of 900 rpms during this 10 minute period. After what I estimate to be around 15 minutes or so, (the vehicle is parked and idling as it has been) the compressor cycles in the OFF mode and the engine rpms jump up to around 2500 rpms.When the system cycles back ON, the engine speed drops down to around 1500rpms(obviously WAY out of specs, wouldn't you say?). I discovered this little malfunction one day as I was driving the car, and it suddenly became damn hard to bring the car to a stop(I had to shift the transmission into neutral to take the engine out of the equation. To relieve this problem I would shut the car off and leave it sit for anywhere from 5 to 7 minutes Re-starting the vehicle at this point everything returned to normal and I could drive and stop the car in a normal manner.
None of these symptoms occured if the temp. outside was under 80 degrees F. Pretty weird,huh? There wasn't any of the local shops(not even the honda dealer) that could duplicate this problem...and I know that I wasn't imagining all of this. This car went to the dealer that I bought my volkswagen from as a trade-in. The honda had 255,000 miles on it when I let it go.
- vw guy 10, Bel Air, MD, US