Well, as the title says, Hello! I'm pretty new to these forums.. I've been ghosting around HAN for about a month now, and have learned a lot just from that, but I don't know a whole lot about vehicles, and I don't know much about cars but I would love to learn as much as I can!

I just recently upgraded from my piece of crap 94 cavalier beater to a '96 Acura Integra GS-R! I've been driving it for a little over a month and a half, and I'm loving the hell out of it!

Some of the pictures can be seen @ http://dominia.whoppo.net/acura

2 problems i'm not sure about... when the car's tach reads between 3k-3.5k rpms, they're a tinny sounding, fast paced tick... and I don't know what that is, if it's bad, or anything.. it happens at the same rpm range no matter what gear i'm in. I was thinking maybe it was a thing where hopefully I just needed to clean/replace the spark plugs because the consistency of them firing off between those rpms might cause a misfire in one of the cylinders? (It's a pretty far fetched guess, like I said I don't know much.)

Also, I'm new to Honda, and V-Tec.... and the car seems like it revs very high.. I don't know if it's just my ears playing games with me since I'm not used to having the car yet? But I usually shift @ 3,000rpm if i'm driving steady, and 4 if I'm accelerating quickly. Are these high rev sounds normal? Could the be related to the 1st problem??

At what points to other GS-R drivers around here shift for normal/speeding??

Thanks so much,
Brian