My friend has a 91 CRX Si 5speed. He was having some headgasket issues so we decided to change the gasket ourselves. Pulled the head off and got it completely rebuilt. Everything new minus valves. This started last weekend and it took the shop 5 days to rebuild the head. We started putting it back together yesterday, saturday, and now its sunday night and the car still isnt running. Cleaned up the top of the block with a block of wood and sand paper to make it nice and smooth and clean. The head looked beautiful and we got a full gasket set from felpro. First put the head on with gasket already in place on head. Torqued the head studs down in two steps, first 22 ft lbs. following the necessary steps and then again at 49ft lbs. Put intake and exhaust mani's on. Now, we lined the crank up to TDC with the white mark on the pulley and the mark on the lower timing belt cover. Lined up the two marks on the cam gear to be parallel with the head and put the timing belt back on. Now the plug wires go back on. At this point my friend is sooped his car will go back on the road. So i'm happy for him, its been a week. He goes to start the car and its idleing like crap. So we're guessing its off a tooth or two. Check the timing. Things seem fine. We musta re done it at least 10 times. Our problem, cylinders 3 and 4 are not firing. The motor is just running on two cylinders. It idles, barely, but it idles and dies if you rev it up and get off the throttle. Now, wtf can be the problem. I'm stumped. I've done a timing job on my DSM and never would have though it would be this hard on his lil single cam CRX. Does anyone have any tips or did i miss something while doing this? Please help us out as i would like to have his car back on the road. Its not modded too much, dropped, intake, gutted cat, and 2.5in catback, but its a nice lil car. Oh and before i forget, the compression seems fine, its not pushing any water. I'm about to pull my hair OUTTTTTTT...

 

was the motor at tdc when you put the head back on?

 

no we put it at TDC when we were ready to put the timing belt back on.

 

no one else has any thoughts?

 

I redid my brothers head gasket and kinda had the same problem it wouldn't start. We blew a starter trying to get it started. We finally got it running by putting the number 1 piston all the way to the top. Then we put the timing belt back on. it started with no problem after we put a new starter on. I would try that just to see if it will run all the pistons. Good Luck
IM me if it worked or not.

 

si's or i think 1.6's in general don't use the 2 marks on the cam pulley to line them up. you use the single mark on the pulley at about 7 o'clock on the cam pulley and line it up w/ the pointer on the inside cover behind the pulley.

 

interesting. We didnt bend any valves doing this did we?

 

even if you dont use the right marks the car should still run okay. it will misfire here and there but it should be okay to drive around and idle should be normal, minus the misfire. i lined up my cousins timing with the 3 marks instead of the single white one and it ran fine. he even took it to track like that becus we were too lazy to fix it.

you might want to check and see if the distributor is in correctly. it might 180 degrees off. i did that the first time i replaced my distributor and it ran pretty shitty. called my friend up and found out it was in the wrong way. tried it agian and it ran fine. it is possible to stick it in the wrong way.