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Hey, I'm planning on fixing my wheels so I can drive it back home to MN when school gets out this year. I want to rebuild it to try to salvage my car and just to be able to tear into an engine myself.

I've got the car set in the garage and I'll be tearing into it later this week to make sure that it is able to be rebuilt. Right now I've got a compression of 120, 0, 15, and 100 in cylinders 1, 2, 3, and 4 respectively. I've had friends tell me that they've never seen such bad readings, especially the 0 in cylinder 2. I just opened the head cover hoping to find that a valve was stuck open or some other minor problem, but everything looked great up there. I'll be digging deeper to get to the head and the block to see what the mess is like. I'll try to post pics of what ever I find.

I had 30 in 2 and 4. I bought a new motor.

Good luck man. Rebuilds are fun, but expensive. If you do it at a decent pace, you won't forget where everything goes. Just remember to keep any mating parts with their partners. Journals, anything valve related, pistons pins and rods.... be satisfied at the end and don't skimp out. Get a full gasket kit, ebay ones are good. Get a waterpump/t belt kit, and an oil pump, thermostat, and everything else you can think of. Make sure you own a torque wrench. Enjoy

hey were in MN are you going to stay at? Good luck with the rebuild man!

Its been slow, I was going to drain the oil but the jack that I was planning on using was covered with hydrolic fluid when I pulled it out of the case . Took off the hood, drained the coolant instead and started to label hoses, cables, etc.

A friend of mine keeps saying that if I put the car high enough on jack stands, I should be able to drop the engine out from underneath the car. I've been looking through the shop manual and some of the swap guides on the site to see if it would work or not and they all say to lift it out. I can imagine that it would get tricky with the transmission where it is, but I just wanted to ask if any reader has had success dropping the engine out from the bottom.

mx-3_4evr wrote:hey were in MN are you....

I'll be heading to the St. Michael/Albertville area when I finish. Hometown...

Found the problem. Pulled the head off and found these...



The cylinder with the chipped valve had 15psi, though I don't know how it had any compression with that valve the way it is. The one to the right was the 0psi cylinder, the valves don't shut because of bent lips on the sides. I'm worried that something may be cracked/broken/F'd in the head above the 0psi cylinder, there was a ton of oil that came from above. It's slot in the header was full too. Everything looks fine in the block as far as I can tell.



Some buildup on the pistons but the walls are nice and smooth. I'm sending the stuff to the machine shop to be checked out anyway though.