Hello Everyone, this is my first time posting anything here and I hope my post follows the rules. In April of 2017 I bought a used 2002 Honda Accord LX which had 160,000 miles on it and it has a manual 5-speed transmission. Traveling down to North Carolina on Monday, August 7 and when I got down around Fredericksburg, Va.,the car starting running crappy and the check engine light was blinking, not steady. I had a cheap code reader and plugged it in and it said that #4 cylinder was misfiring. I'm not any sort of mechanic, I was close to a Pep boys auto parts store and I went in and bought new plugs and a new distributor cap and rotor and changed them,(the wires were brand new when I got the car) and it still didn't make any difference, it was still reading a misfire. There was a Honda dealer about three miles away so I called them and explained the problem and they said to drive it over and they'd fix it. After nearly four hours of labor and checking a variety of things, including the power packs, they finally came out and said that the engine needed to be torn down, they felt it was a compression issue. I only paid $2400 for it the repairs were going to cost more than it's worth. They asked me how far I had driven the car with the check engine light blinking and I said no more than three miles including the two miles to the Honda dealer who I told the light was blinking and they still told me to drive it over! Does anyone have any advice on what I should do or any ideas about what the problem could be? Sorry about the long post but I wanted to explain it all. Thanks

 

welcome to the forum: do a compression check to see what the #4 cylinder reads, you may be able to borrow one from pep boys or auto zone. if compression low may be valve bent burnt or damage. if there is a lot of blow by from the piston if will blow a lot of air our of the pvc or oil cap. if a cracked head, water in the oil pan or lots of blow by into the radiator with the cap off, make sure the engine is cold to take the rad cap off. then run eng.

 

The High mileage Accords will leak around the head gasket and can cause one cylinder's fuel mixture to get too lean.. (contaminated with coolant or water) This would cause a one cylinder misfire situation. Is your car slowly consuming coolant or is it overheating at all?

 

Thank you for your advice and i will try and do just that. I'll let you know if it was successful. Thanks again

 

There doesn't appear to be any oil leaking from the head gasket. I sure would have thought that the Honda dealer I took it to would have checked that, maybe he did and didn't write it down. Thank you for your advice

 

Thanks to you both for your advice. In my original post I had said that when it started misfiring I took it the closest Honda dealer who spent four hours working on it and then came out and told me that it would cost more to get it fixed than the car was worth. They were talking about doing a complete tear down of the motor. So a friend of mine drove three hours down and picked the car up from the Honda dealer on a flat bed trailer and brought it back home. To make a long story short I thought before I get rid of the car I'll let a shade tree mechanic who lives nearby and let him take look at it. After and hour and a half he pulls the car out front and the damn thing was running as good as it did before all this happened!! The problem? It was one of the spark plug wires that was bad so he put new wires and plugs on it and that was that. Thank God I decided to let him look at before I got rid of it!! The Honda mechanic spent four hours on it and couldn't nail the problem down and charged me $165. The shade tree guy charged me $125 which included the wires and plugs!! I just thought I'd let you guys know since you took the time to answer my first post. Thanks again

 

thank you for the reply, glad you got it fixed.