Posted by MadMav71 (63.124.245.234) on February 10, 2001 at 11:28:59:
OK so I go out on this beautiful sunny day and crank my car and just let it sit and run for a LONG time to get up to operating temperature. The longer it runs, the worse the smoking gets and the worse the miss. So after a while the miss becomes constant, instead of just sporadic once every three or four rotations. At that point, I figured I could just pull a plug wire and see which cylinder I was missing on. Bingo. My number one cylinder was dead as a doorknob. I pulled the plug and there was some oil. I didn't think it was enough to cause it to oil foul, but I guess I was wrong. I put in a new plug and it ran like a top, until that one started to gum up too and it started missing again. I took a closer look at my valve-stem seals, and guess what? There aren't any! Most of them have deteriorated so badly that they are literally no longer there. I guess maybe I was just mis-reading the smoke I was getting out of wishful thinking.
So here's what I need to know. I think that with the valve-stem seals this bad, this would cause my oil-fouling, and it's not necessarily rings, right? Come on guys, reassure me. I don't want to even think about that possibility. Also, when I replace the valve-stem seals, is there anything else I need to do? Should I drop the oil pan and clean out the debris from the rotten ones? I had an oil pump fail on my first Maverick a long time ago and was told that was the reason... valve-stem debris had clogged it up. What about the oil holes in the block? What's the best way to clean those out without taking the whole mess apart?
Any and all help is appreciated, as always.