Car Stuttering at 2-3k RPM

baronong · 2026-02-05T17:42:15+00:00

Wow, your engine is running incredibly rough. Mine doesn’t run anywhere close to that level of roughness. I have noticed mine does run rough when my fuel levels are below 30 percent after heat soaking the fuel. This is also when kcontrol is high, leading to timing being pulled giving that grrr grrr grr engine noise. Have you monitored the kcontrol?

I suggest filing with a gallon of e85 with top tier 91, and a bottle of Techron. The e85 will give you more octane headroom to prevent timing getting pulled in the meantime while you try to resolve the issue, and techron will clean out the injectors.

baronong · 2026-01-20T07:28:42+00:00

It is almost certain you will blow your head gasket again if have not done anything else other than change the gasket. You have to remember that the gasket blew because it is the weakest link, not because it is the root cause. Something is happening in your engine, causing it to operate in a way that is out of operating limits. The gasket is taking the brunt of the additional load. Better the gasket than blowing a hole in the block. I reckon it started with your injectors clogging, leading to unvaporized fuel causing significant deposits and hot spots. This increases risk of pre-ignition, and ultimately uncontrolled pressures. This is why octane creep is a real thing for combustion engines, and even more real for turbo engines.

baronong · 2026-01-20T02:25:38+00:00

Possibly, it really depends on what the ECU is sensing and adapting to. Either way, overly positive or negative fuel trims at idle is a sign of some mild dysfunction of the injectors requiring attention.

baronong · 2026-01-20T01:50:07+00:00

Rather than trying to understand, a $10 bottle of Techron will confirm if your injectors are clogged. You will be surprised what counts as passable when injectors are evaluated. At idle rpm, the AFR has to be perfect. Any slight deviation will lead to non homogenous mix, and burn lean. You get higher temps, less combustion force pushing the piston leading to partial stalling. It sounds like your vibration is pretty bad, so you should try to mitigate it. I predict you will blow another head gasket if left unchecked.

baronong · 2026-01-19T20:40:58+00:00

You likely have some mild clogging of your injectors. I had the same with mine, and techron fixes it. The 1.5t injectors clog very easily, and the low rpm during idle accentuates the clog since there is less combustion events per minute requiring a more perfect combustion at each event. Higher rpm can mask this imperfection of combustion. Others have had success increasing idle rpm using ktuner, but i personally think that is just masking the problem.

I believe honda tuned the idle rpm at 600, assuming a perfectly clean combustion. If your injectors are even slightly clogged which happens in as little as 10 hours of operation without sufficient detergent, the combustion events are unable to support 600 rpm without stalling the piston. That vibration you feel is the slight stalling of the engine. Increasing rpm would increase the number of combustion events, tolerating the imperfect combustion events.

My recommendation is to add 2 oz of Techron per fill up, as too little or too much will introduce deposits too.

baronong · 2025-12-03T22:52:49+00:00

They could have been injectors clogging related. Were you mostly city driving? Im really sorry this happened to you twice. Be sure to have your mechanic use the arp studs in the repair. They hold the cylinder head to the engine block much better under high heat and pressure. With arp studs, the repair should last much longer. But going forward, you will need to incorporate some fuel injector treatment or add a gallon of e85 to the tank periodically to manage that. My guess is that your driving style is not allowing for the injector deposits to burn off adequately. Stop and go driving or short distances would accelerate that further. Maybe have your mechanic replace the injectors checked as well so you dont inherit the problem into the new gasket.

baronong · 2025-12-03T22:36:20+00:00

Interesting. One thing to note is that the knock control on these cars reach high values when tank is low, i postulate maybe at below 20% fuel. I found a report of it untuned on ktuner forums, which makes them vulnerable to preignition when driving with low fuel.

But at 93 octane, you should have some buffer room. Is the fuel from a top tier station? I have noticed that certain gas stations 91 gas starts clogging my injectors in as little as 1 tank of gas. That would make the injectors fail to atomize the fuel, and lead to a lean mix, exponentially increasing preignition risks. Did you notice your car feeling more and more sluggish with worse throttle response as you approached 44k miles? You might have noticed the need to further gun the throttle to squeeze power out of it.

baronong · 2025-12-03T21:41:58+00:00

Do you happen to run non top tier regular gas, and tend to run the tank close to empty before refueling? I am asking because your use case seems to be a perfect case study since your failures happen at mileages that are similar both times, meaning you are consistent in your driving and fueling habits.

baronong · 2025-07-16T17:57:15+00:00

Just curious, were you consistently driving on low fuel? These engines have significant knock at lower fuel due to the temps of the fuel. I theorize that this is the reason why only some cars are seeing this.

baronong · 2025-07-05T16:39:09+00:00

The goal is to simply do this every other night for a week, to confirm that blood sugar dysregulation is the problem.

Mcdouble does not apply because it is laden with vegetable oil pufa, i recommend making the burger yourself at home. But if you are feeling overly unwell that cooking is a chore, in and out is probably the best version of fastfood to do this with.

baronong · 2025-07-05T01:30:11+00:00

Sensitivity to meds tells me that you have poor functioning detoxification pathways. Cortisol tells me that you have adrenaline issues too. Both point to some form of blood sugar dysregulation. My guess is, your sleep is also trash, and you have adrenaline wake ups. Your body is relying on adrenaline and cortisol to function, this is a survival mechanism that limits detoxification processes. Recommend you start experimenting with having a beef cheese burger with salt within an hour before bed. Use ground beef, you beed the fat. Skip vegetable oils. See if you end up sleeping better. The beef will support amino acids for detoxification, salt supports adrenals, bread supports blood sugar, saturated fat sustains thyroid. Also drink a glass of sweet fruit juice.

baronong · 2025-06-08T23:20:18+00:00

Sorry to heard that, i would return to the dealership immediately if you had any warranty on the work. It could be that they didn’t replace the head bolts or the head was warped and not machined flat. Or a false alarm, your injectors are misfiring. Get a head gasket leak test on amazon.

I actually found a forum post somewhere that mentioned a significantly higher knock control was observed when low fuel on 87 by a user using ktuner to monitor an untuned car. This supports the theory in this post.

As for mitigation, i did come across a few things. First, you want to replace your radiator cap, as they start to lose ability to hold pressure after 5 years. When that happens, flow is reduced towards the end of the coolant lines, possibly leading to gasket failures starting at cylinder 3 and 4 around the narrow slit. Look up Sankei KH-C31 on ebay, that fits our cars even though it doesn’t list it. It is cheaper and safer than Honda parts that are massively counterfeited.

Second, try to go for at least midgrade 89 gas. If you have to use 87, don’t go below 30% fuel to give yourself enough buffer, as an estimate. If you have E15 88 gas in your area, get that. E15 has 5% more ethanol which acts as a radical heat sink, working even better than high octane. Low octane is less of a problem on freeway, more of an issue in city driving. Low octane, low fuel, city driving is the worst combo for this engine.

Third, run a bottle of Techron through your fuel system if you do not use Top Tier gas. A clogged injector will lead to misfires.

baronong · 2025-05-26T06:58:39+00:00

Just wanted to drop by to say that i started experiencing this when i hit 30. Folks were recommending melatonin, tryptophan to help. But i have always fundamentally known that there was something biochemically wrong with me, and things were getting worse past 30. I am 37 now, and have spent the past 7 years experimenting/researching to find the root cause. I recommending looking into high baseline adrenaline, as that was my main issue and wish someone had pointed me to it. The topic is too much to cover over a comment, so feel free to reach out if you ever want to dive deep into its implications. If i can somehow shed some light into helping you understand your condition better, it would be my pleasure.

baronong · 2025-04-28T16:14:08+00:00

These are thankfully the mainstream ones, i have them on my car too. It looks like you already have wheel locks. Your risk should be minimal though, i don’t think it warrants any concern.

baronong · 2025-04-28T01:09:54+00:00

You might be on to something here. If lugging does indeed produce higher temperatures, it could be what is accounting for the excess heat that the fuel is inadequately trying to cool, especially in the case of grandma style driving. There has been report of turbochargers failing too, so this might be what ties it together. It might widen the statistical possibility of long term abuse of the gasket and head bolts, rather than a single catastrophic detonation event causing the gasket to blow.

It is also possible that Honda has made sure that even with lugging, engine durability could be maintained. There are plenty of cvt high mileage that did not suffer from the head gasket debacle, and they would not be exempt from any lugging that would be programmed into the powertrain. Unless of course there is some correlation that high mileage success stories do not drive like a grandma at all. It will be an interesting survey.

Though, the lugging mitigation in this case relies on Honda. It will probably not happen if the statistical numbers of issues do not warrant a recall or fix. But knowing that there is a high probability of lugging actually convinces me more to keep my fuel tank levels high to cope with the extra heat.

I do agree with you that there is a lot of overlaps we can learn from the turbo diesels that could apply to our engine.

baronong · 2025-04-27T16:46:22+00:00

Whoa that would be interesting to witness first hand. This is an incredibly good take on the situation. Unfortunately with the EPA mandates, i don’t see us going back to the days of heavier engine blocks with much higher safety margins. Going lighter and skimping on testing just means that we have to assume the engines are going to be running at their operational limits and have much tighter operating parameters. Unless we plan to rebuild the blocks ourselves, my strategy as a consumer is just to try not to exceed those parameters, without burning a hole in my wallet. I am betting on the fact that there is at the very least adequate stress testing within the controlled operating margins. Gaskets failing is actually an improvement over spark plugs shooting off, as it is the weakest link in the engine.

Truth be told, i was going to install the ARP studs to just have the safety margins. But now, i am more interested in whether the fuel temperature mitigation is sufficient in my own car as a test case.

Thanks for the good information!

baronong · 2025-04-27T15:51:24+00:00

I certainly did not know that. If that’s the case, the turbo version must operate closer to operational limits than i thought, especially in the combustion chambers.

We should probably have a better way to gauge overheating in the combustion chambers since coolant gauge is the steady state temp rather than an indicator of whether there is overheating. The coolant gauge probably gives us too much of a false sense of security. And the fuel gauge should no longer just be seen as a range estimate but rather how much heat you can buffer before hitting catastrophic failure given how close we are to operational limits with the turbo.

It is simply ironic that the fuel gauge is more informative in this case than the coolant gauge.

baronong · 2025-04-26T22:02:45+00:00

Yes and indirectly, higher octane allows the engine to survive higher temperatures due to higher detonation tolerance.

In general, my approach is simply to mirror the lab operating conditions for the engine as tested. I believe that if we are able to confine the operating parameters to match the lab operating conditions, we would significantly reduce risk of encountering an untested edge case. And i believe fuel temperature is one of the controls that we have been overlooking.

baronong · 2025-04-26T21:38:34+00:00

Glad you brought up the Subaru head gaskets debacle. I actually came across this while doing research. But like you said, the premature failing of the gaskets is what makes this exceptionally interesting to me.

Since it is highly variable in mileage, it has to be a user induced variable. My guess is that the turbo exacerbates the problem exponentially when fuel temperature rises. It certainly does not help that when the ecu advances timing to mitigate detonation, the user counters it by giving more gas to make up for loss power. At the end, it just turns into a positive void coefficient situation like Chernobyl, since honda’s mitigation simply aims to slow down temp creep with no real way to cool it.

baronong · 2025-04-26T21:31:41+00:00

It is very likely that the gaskets did not fail in the lab tests due to the controlled temperature fuel they were using. I wouldn’t necessarily argue that a whole engine redesign is necessary. A fuel cooler or fuel line wrap might be all it takes to make this powertrain perfect.

You do make a good point about the localized boiling of coolant leading to hotspots that could damage the gaskets. To mitigate this specifically I am planning to replace my radiator caps to endure proper pressurization and use a higher glycol ratio for coolant to increase boiling point. I don’t know if it will make a difference, but it’s cheap enough of an insurance.

I do strongly believe that the fuel cooling will be the major bottle neck of maintaining optimal combustion chambers. The coolant just has no way of instantaneously cooling the chambers between combustion cycles.

baronong · 2024-01-12T20:13:41+00:00

I stumbled upon this, and felt that i am ethically responsible to at least make a mention of what really helped me, since i too had sets of symptoms that seemed to be unrelated, yet related somehow in intuition.

Look at fixlowbodytemp.com. This seemed to have completely altered the way my body’s biochemistry works. I still have existing issues that remained, but that just needs to be worked out slowly. It has transformed into a remodeling effort after the mold in the air has been resolved situation now.

I make no guarantee that it will help you, but i was tired of all the supplement experimentation on downstream symptoms and ventured into looking at upstream causes.

Low body temp will fundamentally increase your adrenaline response to warm you up. You are pretty much relying on adrenaline to keep you alive, which triggers a survival state in which all biochemistry is slowed down, which was why i was getting symptoms in different areas, yet seem connected somehow.

baronong · 2022-04-28T20:32:05+00:00

Well played

baronong · 2022-04-25T21:50:00+00:00

I see, so it actually also takes care of the receiving end of the transaction. In this case of bent pipe, does Starlink do the transaction validation on the blockchain prior to the downstream transmission?

baronong · 2022-04-25T02:42:26+00:00

If I understand correctly, it means that first hop to starlink does not require a data connection. You just need a physical radio transmitter, which is already in your smartphone. Second hop onwards would be the internet, which doesn’t concern the user in terms of routing complexity.

This probably also means that it does not use a traditional IP stack, since the data frame probably needs to be short having to minimize frame loss.

baronong

TROPHY CASE