Hi i have had my check engine light on for a while now. just the other day my parking brakes light came on and my dad has changed the oxygen sensor. it seems to be picking up a lil better now. the problem now is just that cylinder 1 is misfiring. i read the code and it gave me a 8 which is top dead centor position or code 17 which is the vehicle speed sensor. i have tried looking for it and i cannot seem to find it. could you tell me what you think is wrong with this car. im tired of it flashin while driving.

the car is a 1997 honda accord vtec. 2.2l 4 cyl 2 door

 

Its probably a bad distributer and a bad vehicle speed senser. I would fix the tdc senser first then the miss then the vss. If you want an etm to test all the wire go to www.hondatech.info and do a search for your car. You will need a digital multimeter with a hertz function to test both the tdc and the vss thy are both wave form inputs.

 

He said that it is 8 or 17 when counting the flashes. So I am guessing that he isn't sure if the first flash was a long or short one.

The code repeats itself at least one more time when you short that service connector. Double check the code when it repeats. The long flash will be obvious for the code 17.

 

Or go to AutoZone & have them use an OBD-2 code reader to get the more detailed code.

 

ouch ya he is rite I missed that. Your car is obd2. You can still blink codes but is not common practice you have to short a wire in the dlc.

How are your reading the code?

 

He must be reading it with the flashing-CEL method. Otherwise he would have posted P1359, P1361, or P1362; all of which display 8 flashes of the CEL. And there wouldn't be any confusion between code 8 & code 17 because you simply read the code off an LCD display.

He hasn't replied after his original post, so ???