How do you adjust the idle?

Have you tried giving your idle air control valve a clean? It's located underneath your throttle body and if it's dirty it causes the idle to become high. The best thing to do is take the throttle body off, remove the screws for the IACV (apply a lot of pressure as they're quite easy to round due to old-age) and give it a wipe with carb cleaner. Alternatively, you can spray the cleaner directly into the small hole at the opening of the throttle body (so you don't have to take the whole thing off), but it's important to wait a while until the cleaner has dried before starting/driving the car. The idle speed for the 4A-FE, 5A-FE and 7A-FE is controlled by the ECU, so there's no adjustment screw as such.

yip just like what kiwi said but if after all that and it still idles high then probaly someone went tampering with the timing by moving the distributor slightly forward or backwards this can make the car idle faster or slower idealy racers do this to get a quicker responce on the throttle at low end torque. or your TPS is faulty or have been tampered with. also check for vaccume leaks as these can be the cause sometimes.

Was this problem resolved?

Yodadex said:

So cleaning the "idle air control valve" will automatically adjust the idle to whatever it originally was spec for? I feel like my idle is a little high so I wanted to start somewhere.

Clean it with what? simple green? engine degrease? brake cleaner?
This thing right?

Click to expand...

Throttle body cleaner would probably work best.

If not, then Carb Cleaner.

Does it consistently run at 1200 rpm? Or does it eventually drop in RPM? My car (97 Corolla DX 1.6) starts up and idles between 1800 -2200 RPM and it will idle at that for 10-15 minutes until it warms up and then it will eventually drop down to 700-900 RPM..

Im sure my IACV could use a cleaning lol.

Note: I would NOT use Carb cleaner because it is not O2 safe, i would only use Throttle Body cleaner, that is O2 safe...

Mine idles around 1200 on start up and then settles down to 700-800 after 5 minutes. I guess I'll have to check mine out in a bit..

Depends on outside temperature. I've seen idle speeds of 1800+ and occasionally over 2K. As the engine temperature increases the idle should gradually drop until it's at 750 RPM when fully warmed up and not in gear, or 600 if you've got a manual transmission.

There should also be an under-hood emissions sticker with idle speed specs.

I'll add there have been a bunch of threads here about temp sensors that quit. If it doesnt tell the ECM that its warmed up it will stay on high idle.

-SP

cleaning the throttle body definitely helped. Thanks