Posted by Steven Huff (216.67.201.75) on February 10, 2001 at 12:55:44:
In Reply to: Eureka! I found it! posted by MadMav71 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.
Still a possibility that you will get some smoke up through the rings. Now that you have plugged that vacumn leak, it may try to suck it up, especially on a long downhill when you are off the throttle.