Bad Cylinder... Need advice!!!

[Thor Johnson]

On Sat, 10 May 1997, Johnny wrote:


> Not firing but has fuel and spark means you either get spark at the
> wrong time, or you have a LARGE LEAK. Do a leak down on it. Takes about
> a minute to do. Listen closely to figure out where it is leaking. You
> will hear that "shhhhh" sound either in the crankcase, intake manifold,
> or exhaust, or sometimes right out the side if it is a head gasket. If
> you hear it in the crankcase, that usually means hole in piston, broken
> ring land and ring, cracked piston, etc. If it's coming out the exhaust,
> you have a burnt, bent, cracked, broken, or stuck exhaust valve. Ditto
> on the intake valve if you hear it at the intake manifold.

Actually found what it was- one of my injector mosfets failed, so I wired 
#1 to #3 (thus forcing batch, but... we have four now!).

> Be key here is "white plume". Does it smell like hot oil? My first guess
> is broken piston. Leak down will tell all. And yes, you can have a hole
> or cracked piston with no other signs of anything wrong except missing
> on one and white smoke at sustained high rpm. Been there, done that,
> more than once.

  It smells like water+formeldehyde.  But related to oil- if I run the 
engine rich (we were trying to foul plugs- found that you can't read 
insulator color.... anyone know how an oxy sensor works w/Meth?), we 
contaminated the oil with Meth.  Is this expected?  Also, the engine has 
a large blow-by.  If I can fix the confuser problems, we race no matter 
what.  If not... hell, we might get lucky enough.

  We've sincechanged the oil, and have been trying to drive as much as 
possible, but the computer keeps resetting, so I wonder what the problem 
is (code is same/nearsame as yesterday (ran leanish, but didn't outright 
die), HW is just about unchanged)... guess I should pick with a fine 
needle to pinpoint the changes.

  Only thing that is obvious is that yesterday the battery was BRAND NEW 
(WalMart), today the bttery is 1 day old (left on 2A charge overnight cuz 
we have no charging system).


                Thor Johnson
          johnsont at falcon.cs.mercer.edu
     http://falcon.cs.mercer.edu/~johnsont
                                                    
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