KA24DE won't start... here are the symptoms...

[cgomate]

Rebuilt motor just put back into the car (93 vert).

Cranks and fires once... after that it just cranks. Strong fuel smell at tail pipe.Cold compression test had 120 on all cyl's with NO significant change after adding a little oil to each cyl.

All electrical connections, grounds & fuses have been checked several times and appear to be good.

I removed the dizzy (left the wires attached) and the injectors click and there is visible spark on all 4 plugs when the dist is rotated.

Soooooooo... what's next. Timing, sensors, electronics???

Help.

[Chris28]

I say timing. Turn your crankshaft with a big socket wrench until it is at top dead center. This should be the 2nd to last white mark on the crank pulley when turning the crankshaft clockwise. Once it's there set your distributor to spark plug number one.

Do that and report back haha.

[cgomate]

The no-start condition was distributor timing. Got that fixed fairly easily... Thanks. But that's the end of the good news as the engine belches smoke... white smoke... a lot of white smoke.

This was the first time the engine was started since the rebuild, so i expected some burn off of the assembly lubes, etc... but this is ridiculous. The head was rebuilt by a shop but the short block portion was done by a DIY type, supposedly with JE pistons.

There are no knocks, ticks, grinds, scrapes or other ugly sounds coming from the engine. In fact, it starts easily and runs smoothly and quietly. At idle the smoke will decrease to just a mild haze. But ease into the throttle at all and the smoke just pours out.

It doesn't have the typical sweet smell of coolant so my obvious fear is that its burning oil. While the engine was running i pulled the wires off one injector at a time to see if there was any decrease in the amount of smoke... nope. It appears to be affecting all 4 cyls equally.

So now i need the steps to make an accurate diagnosis. I'm an old school, carb'd V8 kinda guy, so i'm a little out of my element with computer controlled, EFI motors... any suggestions will help.

[liquid_cool]

#1.) you put oil down the cylinders when ya did your test..and if this is a new rebuild...then you have new rings too..they will leak a little oil for a few ...now with that said...did you..torque down the head..then untorque and re-torque again?..did you as the owner check to see if the proper size ring's were used?..and that they turned each opening of each ring to be oposit of eachother during the install?..there are lots of questions i would have for the builder man...id run the beast for a hour or so to try to get a ring seal..this could allso be the valve seals too....you might need to investigate the builds on both end a bit to see who screwd this up.

[cgomate]

Yeah, i hear ya. Unfortunately "rebuilder man" is not available and i may just be paying the price for a craigslist bargain.

I'm 99.99999% sure its oil I'm burning. The coolant in the radiator looks fine and the brand new plugs are wet & badly fouled. I could actually see oil pooled on the top of every piston. My compression numbers are between 165 - 155 warmed up.

So before i resign myself to pulling the motor and learning how to rebuild the lower end, is there anything else that might be causing this?