Bouncing Tach, random sputters

[thumping_accord]

So out of no where my car has developed a random "cough". By cough I mean it sputters randomly, mostly at higher rpm's or when giving it gas at lower RPM's. The tach is bouncing (like crazy) when it sputters, also it feels like my v-tech does not engage every time I get to where it should it engage. I know the typical culprit for the tach bouncing is the dizzy (which I could probably blame the sputtering on as well) or bad grounding. Would this cause my v-tec to not engage? or do I need to look more into other things as well? I'll be replacing the dizzy and checking my grounds hopefully this weekend. As for now I'm babying the car around so that I don't harm anything else.

[thumping_accord]

Update

So I still have failed to get around to checking the grounds and changing the dizzy.... but I have a new, strange, development that is confusing me some.

The other day I was going home from work and getting onto the interstate, after riding behind people that could not figure out how to merge I floored it onto the interstate. Second gear pull from 3k to almost redline (was hard to tell with the tach going crazy.... if it was correct I was doing 10k+rpms lol). As I was flooring it I looked into my rear view and saw a rather large amount of smoke out of my exhaust. This worried me some but not much as when I shifter to third it all went away. I tried to duplicate this the next time I stopped but could not get it to smoke at all. Then I noticed the car was running almost perfect and felt a lot peppier. Since then the sputters have been very minimal (it only does it on a bog when I don't down gear cause I'm lazy lol).

I've checked both my coolant and oil to make sure I had not blown a head gasket or anything like that, but everything looked good. So now I have no clue what caused it to smoke like that. I'm not worried about it much since the motor is running stronger after it happened.

Maybe the cat is getting clogged???

Out of curiosity has this happened to anyone else?

[cp[mike]]

sounds like a bad ignitor in the distributor. It is what normally kicks off the spark event, and when it is going bad, sometimes it just "skips" some of the sparks. Less noticable the higher you rev, but it often still shows itself as a tachometer that is bouncing around like crazy. When skipping some of the sparks, there will be unburnt fuel and stuff coming out of the exhaust so I would imagine it would smoke. Also, ignitors sometimes go bad in such a way that they are sporadic in their symptoms:sometimes they barely work, other times they work perfectly fine for a long while (maybe why you haven't seen it since?) Being that sometimes VTEC doesnt work, maybe the ignitor isnt actually going BAD, but just has a poor ground connection: the VTEC solenoid and distributor/ignitor are very close to each other and I'm pretty sure both ground to the same spot on the thermostat housing.

One other potential source of the smoking could be your valve stem seals. Is it possible you were driving down a hill leading up to that WOT pull? If you are rolling down a hill and letting the engine get pulled by engine braking, then it causes vacuum inside the chambers and can have a tendency to suck oil into the chambers. Then once you get back on the gas it burns off the oil resulting in smoke.

[h22sparkle]

Check inside the distributor for that heavy orange dust. And plus an ignitor would cost 5 bucks tops roughly. If just make sure you got the right connections going on.