I'm having some troubles with my '94 Integra. I've been searching through these forums for a few days now but I'm still at a loss. I should warn you in advance that I am pretty inept when it comes to cars, but I'm trying to fix that by working on this car as well =P

So my problem is this... it started about a week and a half / two weeks ago. I was driving home from work, when the car died, and by that I mean the engine shut off. There was absolutely no warning of any kind, no sputter, no roughness of any sort, the engine just shut off. Lights and CD player stayed on. I pulled over, tried to start it, and it wouldn't. It turns over but nothing happens. Checked under the car, and under the hood. Nothing obvious was wrong there. I got back in, turned the key, and it started back up. Same thing happened the next day. It's been happening ever since. Sometimes I wait a minute and it starts back up, sometimes I wait 5, sometimes right away. Sometimes I can even start while it's still moving before I have pulled over. I can go 20 feet to 20 miles after a restart. It's just not consistent. We can't make it shut off when trying to troubleshoot either so it's very difficult to diagnose this. Sometimes it dies right after starting it, sometimes I can get to work and back without it dying.

I've replacing the fuel cylinder (which includes the fuel pump) and the fuel filter. I just replaced the main relay yesterday. It's good on the liquids, cooling, oil, etc. We have verified spark when it died once as well. We drove it until it died then quickly got under the hood for that. Check engine light comes on when it dies of course, but it's not on when you restart it.

I have only had it several months. It was given a tune up before I bought it from the dealer, but I wouldn't assume he did things right or didn't cut corners. The plugs themselves look good, they were (supposedly) new when I got it from the tune up, same with wires and distributer cap. I took the cap off yesterday as well, and didn't see anything wrong with it (no shavings or anything as I read in another post).

If it's worth noting, it had a valve leak when I test drove it, but the dealer fixed that before I bought it, and it isn't leaking like it was, I can say that for sure and that was also 4-5 months ago. No heating issues, the temp on the dash seems normal to me, but we tried cooking it once and it wouldn't die for us, fans came on while cooking as well.

I'm getting to the point where I'm about to say screw it and bring it into a shop, but I know it's going to be costly to just diagnose it and I've already spent several hundred on parts that didn't fix it. Can someone help me please?

 

Get yourself and OBD reader ($30-$50) and when it dies and the cel comes on, see if you can pull a code so you can have an idea of what's going on.

 

I took it in for a diagnosis today at the dealer. It turned out to be the igniter unit. I did check for spark before, must have been intermittent failure of it. Seems to be working now.