Spiders made the check engine light come on....

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AcuraTech

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No, I'm not on any drugs.
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Had a car come in today with the check engine light on.

Code was for one of the evap canister vent valves being stuck. But the valve was working fine. So i pulled off the atmospheric vent tube attached to said valve. I found it full of very fine thick spider webs, which were impeding the flow. Because there was almost no flow, the PCM assumed the valve was stuck shut and threw a code.

Cleared out the tube and it worked fine.

This isn't as rare as you'd think, Honda has a service news article about it. Only seems to happen on cars that come from Japan. Yellow sac spiders, apparently, which looking online can cause a wicked bite.
 
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This is hilarious. Actually I read a thread about it last week sometime, I think it was on driveaccord.net but it could've been on some acura forum too. There were several members who'd had the same problem. Presumably the spiders get in during manufacture or assembly.
 
There have been a couple threads about plugged EVAP vent lines on the Crown Vic boards. One member got a EVAP low flow code and it turned out to be a spider egg plugging the vent line.
 
The thing is that if you're not familiar with this problem you could be chasing it for a long, long time. And pulling your hair out in the meantime. I've seen this once before, so it was the first place I looked.

I made sure to show our shop apprentice what I found, I could see him chasing a problem like this for 3 days.
 
Originally Posted By: AcuraTech
I've seen this once before, so it was the first place I looked.



Presumably because some tech showed you so you weren't "chasing" the problem for three days.
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did the customer ever find out what it was? was it a free cleaning?

I can see the invoice - "Diagnosed and Removed OEM Spiders - $150" ?
LOL.gif
 
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I saw something similar to this a few years ago on a copier. My wife's office copier would pass the paper through ok but would indicate a jam every cycle. Turns out there was a spider web near the exit sensor. The paper would come through, lift the flag for the sensor up into the web, and the web would hold the flag up for just long enough to trigger a jam.

The whole office staff got a kick out of that one.
 
Originally Posted By: AcuraTech
This isn't as rare as you'd think, Honda has a service news article about it. Only seems to happen on cars that come from Japan. Yellow sac spiders, apparently, which looking online can cause a wicked bite.


So if yellow sac spiders become a new invasive pest here in the USA, we know how it happened.

Hopefully that will not happen, but Honda ought to be taking some precautions to make sure that they're not importing pests along with their cars.
 
Originally Posted By: brianl703
Originally Posted By: AcuraTech
This isn't as rare as you'd think, Honda has a service news article about it. Only seems to happen on cars that come from Japan. Yellow sac spiders, apparently, which looking online can cause a wicked bite.


So if yellow sac spiders become a new invasive pest here in the USA, we know how it happened.

Hopefully that will not happen, but Honda ought to be taking some precautions to make sure that they're not importing pests along with their cars.



This is true...perhaps a simple inspection or wipe down after shipment. Let's hope we don't have to start quarantining import vehicles from Japan.
grin2.gif
 
I don't doubt it at all. Slightly OT, but at work, we've had mud wasps build nests in the small exhaust ports on solenoid switching valves, leading to an entire plant s/d! No OBDII on those babies either. Talk about a needle in a haystack at times.

Joel
 
I saw the thread recently on acurazine where a spider plugged up the drain tube for the evaporator, the water overflowed onto the ECM and fried it. That's an expensive spider.
 
Also an expensive design mistake, putting the ECM where it will get wet if the drain tube for the evaporator gets plugged.

At least they could have put a conformal coating on the ECM board to waterproof it to some degree.
 
Back in the early 80's, my family got our water from a well. An electric pump drew the water from the well, and sent it into our house. Ants by the thousands would crawl into the electrical box on the pump and get fried between the contacts. The pump would then run continuously until the ants were cleaned out.
 
I work in television and bees like to set up camp in the satellite LNB feedhorns. Causes signal loss we can't figure out quickly.
 
Isn't this how the term "de-bug" was coined? From a moth being removed from a primitive computer long ago?

We need not look [censored] than this thread to now know why they are called "pests". LOL
 
Originally Posted By: globey
Isn't this how the term "de-bug" was coined? From a moth being removed from a primitive computer long ago?

We need not look [censored] than this thread to now know why they are called "pests". LOL


Yeah, I believe it was.
 
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