Ok, I am back! And, I spent no time putting my wrench back to work lol. Here is the latest...
1. I took off the intake manifold collector to get to the other spark plug wells. I noticed quite a bit of oil oozing out of it once I got it off, but mostly from the PCV port. But there was some slight fluid build-up on the inside bottom of the throttle body plate though, which I think is odd to have oil that far up the intake. I doesn’t look like I can take the actual intake apart more, so I have it sitting in a way to let the oil drain out of it. The gasket looked fine on it and it doesn’t seem to have any issues that I can see. I left it off for the compression check later on.
2. Unfortunately, that is no happy cart wheels in the garage or cracking of beers after I peeked into cylinders 1,3, and 5
. They look like the same baked up cylinders as the other ones. Here are cylinders and the spark plugs. Sorry, I took crappy pics, but it looks basically like the other ones. Oh, I did take a look at the back of that valves since I had the intake off, and they looked clean and not damaged at all. I am guessing due to the fuel being injected behind them and cleaning them anyways. A small win I guess...
3. After that inspection, I got myself a compression tester from Autozone. It only has a 5 PSI gauge resolution, so I rounded my readings as appropriate. I used the process outlined in the service manuals found on this site and it was pretty straight forward. Some words of caution though, make sure to have all spark plugs holes open. I left the ignition coils in on the other spark plug holes to act as covers once the spark plugs were removed earlier...and I forgot to remove them all when I ran the first test. Let’s just say, flying ignition coils sound scary as hell when you do this test for the first time ever in your life lol. I thought I destroyed the engine on that first test somehow! Now I have to fish around the engine bay to get them all, as they all popped off somewhere once the pressure got high enough lol. Anyways, here are the readings I got and some other notes.
Cylinder #1: 175 PSI
Cylinder #2: 160 PSI
Cylinder #3: 175 PSI
Cylinder #4: 160 PSI
Cylinder #5: 175 PSI
Cylinder #6: 160 PSI
Well, it looks like my piston rings are good-ish...Standard is 185 PSI, with a minimum of 142 PSI. BUUUUT this was on a cold engine, not a hot engine, which is how the service manual tells you to do it. Also of note, the car will crank itself 10 times automatically and then stop. I couldn’t control the number of cranks by releasing the brake or anything, so there isn’t any reason to count the cranks when you do this test. It was just me doing the tests, so I would hook up the compression tester, get in the car and crank it, then come out and see the readings. I did make a video of one of the tests to see if there were issues on each crank, but the pressure built up uniformly and quickly in that video.
3a. Analysis: So, here is my thoughts on the compression test results (flawed thoughts lol). First, each cylinder bank is uniform, so that is good I am guessing. There is a 15 PSI difference between banks, which may not matter in the grand scheme of things, but maybe someone smarter than me can chime on that. I will say there is a 14 PSI differential spec between cylinders from the service manual, but I think they mean from the cylinders in the same bank, not across from each other (if that matters?). Also, the cold engine is going to have different readings from a hot engine, due to piston ring expansion and oil viscosity changes. But I figure a cold engine compression test is a “worst” case test, and compression will only get “better” once the rings expanded and the oil lubes up the piston better. Regardless, I would have to put everything back together again to just to start the engine up, let it warm up (and smoke constantly), than take everything apart again. Plus, the way the engine sits in the car, there isn’t an easy way to do a compression test, without taking everything apart to do it. That is waaay to much of hassle at this point lol. Finally, the service manual and the instructions for the compression tester have plenty of troubleshooting tips depending on the test results. I am not going to re-hash all of them here, but my test results don’t seem to indicate anything wrong with the piston rings (surprisingly). Finally, I will note I just did 6 compression tests (one test each cylinder), nothing else, and that’s it. I didn’t do anything beyond hooking up the tester and cranking the engine.
4. So what’s next? Well, I am going to take one of the valve covers off to see what the sludge issue looks like. But I wanted to get this compression test info posted beforehand to see if anyone chimes in on it while I work that. Because all I know for sure at this point is that I still have coolant loss (head gasket most likely) and the engine is burning oil up, but I don’t know how oil is getting in there at this point. Looking at the intake manifold collector and seeing the oil in there makes me think the oil is some how being forced into it (via PCV?), and them makes it way back down to the combustion chamber and burned up. Oh! I forgot to mention that there are oil trails in the intake manifold (where intake manifold collector connects to) and it seems like oil is making it way in that way possibly.