420A Help with my 1998 Eclipse 420a

[Mamd4th]

So I recently bought a 1998 Eclipse 420a non turbo automatic in decent condition clean title. It has 280k miles since the previous owner would drive it from LA to San Francisco but he rebuild the engine and transmission and I have the paper work for eveything.

He installed a stage 1 Brian Crower camshaft and when I bought it and had it looked at he told me it had a check engine light code P0304 and It would stall sometimes and had high rpm’s in idle because of the camshaft. When I had it checked the compression on cylinder 4 was fine and the temps were were fine. It drives fine it has only stalled once on me while I was making a U-turn.

What I’ve noticed while daily driving is the rpm’s stay at 1000 and sometimes when shifting from drive or park or reverse the revs go up or when I’m at a stop light the revs go up usually like around 1300-1500 never above that but my foots on the brake or when I’m parking and switch it to park the revs go up and to make them go down I step on the gas a tiny bit and they go back to 1000.

I called a DSM specialist near me to get his opinion but their not experts in the 420a engine and what he told me is to find a stock cam and get that installed that it would be better for daily driving and would cost less then tuning and making the car run right with the stage 1 cam.

What should I do? This will be my car for the next 2 years and the farthest I’d ever drive is 100miles from LA to San Diego maybe 2-3 times a year and besides that to work and back so reliability would be nice but not afraid to put money in the car. I did buy a almost 30 year old car so I kinda knew what I was getting myself into.

 

[BLACK'98DSM]

Well first of all that is a DOHC engine (you have 2 camshafts). Second of all stage 1 cams can run fine without a tune. A tune is recommended of course but those aren't aggressive enough to cause issues in my experience. I ran some of the older style Crane stage 1 camshafts with a stock computer/tune for a while without a hiccup. They even had a decent little lope. If you're idling high you have may a vacuum leak. When I switched to stage 2 camshafts it actually lowered the idle speed. I had to add extra fueling at idle to prevent occasional stalling.

 

[Mamd4th]

Thanks for replying, yeah the guy I bought the car from told me has had stage 2 cams installed but the car didn’t run smoothly so he put back the stage 1. The car does have a check engine light (p0304) but they checked the compression on cylinder 4 and they said it’s fine so I hope it’s just maybe the idle air control valve or maybe the ecu needs replaced. If it was a vacuum leak would that cause the cars rpm’s to go up when switching from drive to parked or when sometimes not all the time when at a stop light while foot on brake the car revs go up to like 1300rpms and the car idles at 1000rpms and sometimes when parking when I switch from drive to parked and let go of the brake the revs go up to like 2000rpms but they go back down so that’s what’s been making me worry a bit but I am getting it checked hopefully in like 2 weeks by a place called concept 3 there’s pretty popular in my area and social media.

Oh and the car has stalled on me twice but only when parking like switching from drive to reverse since my parking spot in my apartment is a bit tight so it takes me a couple tries to park good enough to where my neighbors won’t hit my car with there door.