Victory at last

[colbol89]

So I was in the market for a 95+ 240sx that had an SR20DET engine in there and had literally lost 3 of the cars due to them being sold in a day before I was going there to pick them up with cash in hand. After getting frustrated I kept searching when out of the blue I found an RB20DET 240sx that was a little above my price range but had much of the work I intended to do done on the car. Now like all project cars it's not perfect but runs...sort of.

Here is my current situation. I searched the forums for awhile and found things kind of similar to what I'm experiencing but nothing seemed to really sound like the exact problems I've been facing. If I missed a thread feel free to post it. Onto the problems

So recently the car has acquired a few problems. When the car is first started up especially from a cold start, there is a loud, high pitched whine which I believe is from my power steering pump. I'm not positive as I'm fairly new to this all but the sound seems to be coming from the pump and during driving I can feel the power steering struggle and sometimes fade completely for brief periods of time. While this isn't the big problem I just wanted to give all the background symptoms. What's really getting at me is that the car idles usually at 1300rpms, sometimes at 1500rpms and one time idled at 1900rpms. It doesn't typically oscillate between them, mostly just when the engine warms up it picks either 1300rpms or 1500rpms as what it's going to idle at until the car is shut off. Now from a cold start if I start the car and don't give it gas it will start up and then quickly bog down and die. If I do give it gas it will start up and I have to keep giving it a little gas for awhile until the high pitched whine goes away and then most of the time the car will settle at a high idle. Now sometimes even after I've been driving the car for 10 minutes or so, I've been coasting out of gear and the rpms will just drop completely and the car will die. It's happened to me a few times on a highway and definitely is not something I car to continue happening as going 70mph and suddenly having your engine die is not the greatest of times.

For the high idling issue I've heard something about cleaning or adjusting the IAC but I'm lost as to what "cleaning" or "adjusting" really entails. Something about turning a screw to set the idle level lower but then someone else said I'd have to disconnect my tps when setting it and I don't even think my car is equipped with tps. Another person said that my power steering pump failing might be the cause of the car bogging down and wanting to die when I first start it up because after about 15 minutes of driving the car drives like a champion and has no problems. Now just recently today I was coming up a hill in 3rd gear on the way back to my house and I've taken this route many times without any problems but today the car seemed to choke and sputter a little bit, I down shifted into 2nd to try and get a little more torque to make it up the hill and it struggled just the same not being able to get past 3000rpms and a small amount of smoke came out of the exhaust. After getting over the hill it was driving fine as usual but it nearly stalled on me and I had to put my emergency lights on. I think it's running a little rich and am going to try and take it to a performance shop tomorrow to see if they could tune the car for me and check out my a/f ratio and put it on a dyno just to try and figure out what's the story on it.

So I've put some injector cleaner into my car since it couldn't hurt and am trying to diagnose/resolve these problems. Any and all feedback is welcome but please understand if I ask stupid questions as I'm new to this engine and car but I've got to start learning somewhere. Thanks! I'll try and get some pictures up of my car soon Long live the RB's
Modified by colbol89 at 10:26 AM 8/6/2009

[maryjane]

the concern about the high idle, you should post this in the rb engine section. adjust your IAC by screwing it in to turn it down and out to raise the idle. you can run sea foam in the hose that runs into the iac that should help with any build up in it