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honda civic diagnosis

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robbie

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My 1993 honda civic has one cylinder not firing. I pulled the plug out and it was crusted over with hard gray deposits. I cleaned the plug and put it in the end of the wire, and laid it on top of the engine. I started the engine and saw the plug sparking. The cap and rotor are almost new also.

Am I correct in thinking that a lean running condition in that cylinder is what caused the deposits on the plug? If so, I'm guessing that I have a dead fuel injector. Anybody have a better idea?

Before anybody starts asking the really basic questions, the first thing I did was pull the wires one by one to determine which cylinder was not firing, which led me to the one with the crusty plug. It's definitely a dead cylinder, not working at all.
 
Doc Sprocket

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Okay, so now that you know which one is dead, let's eliminate a few things. Check the compression, and compare to the other three. Perhaps swap the injector with one from another cylinder and see what happens. Any CEL codes?
 
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No codes. Also no compression tester. I started noticing a misfire on acceleration a couple of weeks ago. My wife drove the car today and said that it was really rough when accelerating, and when she got home it was rough even at idle.
 
devino246

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robbie

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In case any of you guys were wondering what happened with the Honda Civic, here's the report. I did different tests to determine the root cause of the problem without a compression tester. First I swapped spark plugs. I noticed that the one that had huge crusty deposits was also very oily, whereas the others had a normal thin gray layer of gray deposits but no oil. Anyway, I swapped two plugs, and the same cylinder was still dead. Then I swapped two fuel injectors, same result. Then I swapped the wiring on two injectors, same result.

My conclusion is that either either the rings in this cylinder are totally shot, or the engine is warped enough to cause a leak between an oil passage and the cylinder. I had it all apart six months ago for a new head gasket, and there were no cracks (after an overheat and blown gasket). The engine went bad again over the course of the last two weeks or so, and now that cylinder is pretty much dead. I'm not really buying the warpage theory, because the engine worked for months with a new gasket, and it hasn't overheated since then to cause a crack or burn a hole in the cylinder. So it's probably the rings, which probably got trashed last summer when they were overheated, and have been wearing further since then.

This is sad because we've loved this car a lot, even though all indications suggest that my wife is trying to kill it. She ran it off the road and hit a big rock in the median, she hit a deer, and she overheated the engine twice. Now it needs a new steering rack, it has a crumpled fender, the tail gate hinge is broken, the front bumper is held on by one screw, and it needs an engine rebuild.

Oh well, my kids have gotten too big to ride in the back of this tiny car anyway.
 
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