my 00 Brighton with only 61,000 miles has a problem that just cropped up. The engine runs at a high RPM when 1st started(esp when cold) and RPM's don't drop when you 'blip' the throttle. When you put a load on the engine RPM's drop. Does anyone know what the problem might be?

It's normal part of warm up for the Engine to idle high.

 

Anywhere from a few moments to more than ten minutes. Shouldn't really go over 2000 rpm, maybe 2200 or 2300.

 

But if it's higher than that, you may have a problem elsewhere. Doesn't sound that out of the ordinary though.

this Brighton doesn't have a tach but the motor sounds like it's over revving when cold and also the RPM don't seem to drop off fast enough when you let off on the gas to shift gears. I located a used instrument cluster w/tach. Can I retrofit it and have a working tach?

Do the RPM's seem to drop down after it starts to warm up?

 

The first suspect I would blame if the coolant temperature sensor, it can report a false reading without a CEL. The computer will try to warm-up the car by making it rev higher.

You can retrofit just the tach out of the other cluster into yours. Don't pull any of the needles off, you shouldn't need to. Putting the tach into your cluster will keep your spedometer and odometer reading the same. Take the donor cluster apart first, figure out how it all goes together, then take yours apart and swap it in.

 

High idle can be a sticky idle air control valve, sometimes taking the hose off of the IAC and spraying carb cleaner in can help clean it out. You can also unbolt it from the manifold and spend some time cleaning it and working the valve back and forth.

thanks for the advise esp on the tach retrofit. The problem turned out to be a TB sensor. One other question-is there a way to lubricate a squeaky cluthc pedal?

Hydraulic clutch right? You need to track down where the squeek is coming from. The Clutch pedal pivot can squeek, the clutch master cylinder can squeek, the slave cylinder can sqeek, and the clutch fork can sqeek. The last one is the most likely, the fork sqeeking on the pivot. You can pull the rubber boot up out of the bell housing and drip some heavy oil down the backside of the clutch fork (the side away from the engine) to see if it will help for a while.

 

Find the source of the sqeek first.

thanks for the advise esp on the tach retrofit. The problem turned out to be a TB sensor. One other question-is there a way to lubricate a squeaky cluthc pedal?

 

How did you figure out it was the TB sensor, and what did you do to fix it?