April 16, 2003

Another beautiful night last night, and my wife was in Manhattan with my stepson attending an open house at a school for holistic medicine, so I figured I’d stop by the car on my way home & finally do the compression check. Got all the plugs out and screwed in the plug for the tester. Took all the wires off the distributor cap as I needed to sort out the order anyway, and I have a new set coming from Aircooled.net. Got in the car, turned the key for a couple seconds & went back to take a look at the gauge. 120psi. Much better than I had hoped for. Took the hose and adapter out of cylinder 2 and did cylinder 1. 128psi. Nice. Got to cylinder 3. 50psi. Yipes. Did cylinder 4, 120psi and then went back to cylinder 3 to check it again. Again, 50psi. Not good. At this point I was thinking it was most likely valve related, as I didn’t think the rings could be that far gone on only one cylinder. It started raining so I packed up & went home, trying to figure out what to do next. A couple people on the Type3 list said I should check my valve adjustment (will do that tonight or Saturday) and Russ mentioned that there’s a chance that a piece of carbon might be caught in the valve keeping it from sealing shut.