Surging

You could have a large airbubble in your cooling system as that is a common cause.

A common way to burp this out is to put the car on a level plane, take off the radiator cap, start the car and vary the engine speed from normal to about 2-3000 rpm -- just cycle it with a couple of second intervals. Watch for the radiator level to drop. When it drops, add more coolant (the honda OEM or approved kind). Eventually, the air bubble will burp out and the problem hopefully will be gone.

Not sure on your Odyssey, but most Hondas have a nipple that can be opened to let the air out and basically do the same as described above. You may want to check with a service manual on the specifiic procedure for your van.

Remco

Oops -- just noticed that you asked the same question below this one. Just follow their advice.

On 11/29/2005 2:03 PM Remco spake these words of knowledge:

Yes, this was the 'original' message which didn't show up on my server

-- until today.

Anyway, I did top off the coolant, but it wasn't very low; I don't believe it took more than about a cup to fill the overflow tank, and the radiator itself was full. (How about that antifreeze... they tell you up front that they're selling you half water, and *still* charge $13 for a gallon. Oh, my achin' backside. Ah, well.

The problem turned out to be just what it sounded like - the part they replaced is called an IAC, and I believe that stands for Idle Adjustment Controller. The technician said she had never heard one cycling as fast and as hard as mine. Replacing that one part solved the problem, and was covered under my warranty (which expires in 220 miles). It would otherwise have cost me $259.89!

Thanks to all who responded.

RFT!!! Dave Kelsen

Such poor quality control these days. That part was designed to fail after the warranty expired!

You might become familiar with

. The Odyssey has a lot of problems that keep showing up. Most are covered in detail by the thousands of forum members. It is an information resource that any odyssey owner cannot do without.

actually, that's /good/ qc. detroit's spent a lot of money on r&d over the years, but as you can see, not much has gone into innovation - a huge proportion has gone into lifetime limitation. it's /very/ hard to make something that reliably works well for a specific period then fails. nature tends to be for rapid failure or long life. lifetime limitation has been the prime objective of the last 30 years. ask any taxi driver how long the last transmission on their detroit hunkojunk lasted - they'll all give you a startlingly similar number. that's no coincidence.

On 11/30/2005 7:53 AM Woody spake these words of knowledge:

Yep. Been a member since October of 2000. You can go there and see pictures of my Oddy, in fact. Incredible source of information.

RFT!!! Dave Kelsen