well since this forum gets a lot more traffic than accord and tech ill post it here as well...

car: 90 Accord LX auto

background: owner went on vacation for a week, ran til they left. car wouldn't start 3 days after they left on the first try. I thought it was the main relay since it started after a couple of tries. I moved the car forward. Four days pass and they tried to start it today. No luck at all.

It is not the main relay.

Has spark, Has fuel. I took out the spark plugs to check what was going on. And cylinder 1 the spark plug was loose to begin with. This was odd because I just did a tune-up to the car about 3 months ago and the same thing happend before. Also the spark plug looked like this.



The two plugs closet to the distributor still looked newish and the threads were still shiney. I did a compression test on the two outter cylinders and they were both the same compression. So i put in a new set of plugs and same thing? Maybe i did the compression test wrong?

anyone have any clues or suggestions?

 

What was the result of the compression test? Was the car acting up before they left?

 

i just verified compression and it does not look good...after 10 cranks on each cylinder its 45, 60, 60, 75. i made sure the guage wasnt broken and on on a focus it was 150psi after 2 cranks...

this is very odd why all of a sudden this happened...any suggestions/clues? probably a headgasket?

she did overheat the engine, but that was two months ago...and its been driving like a champ ever since...

 

how many miles on the engine? was the car burning oil before? and get a new guage, haha.

 

90k miles, wasnt really burning oil, more like leaking oil...guage is brand new, i picked it up last night just to test this...

 

That compression is too low for the engine to run... strange that it would run one day but not the next, you could try a wet compression test (with oil) or do a leak down test, but this isn't sounding too good.

 

i dont have a leakdown guage, and i wonder if timing somehow jumped? but when i crank it i dont hear anything (valves, pistons) hitting each other...

 

Ohh, I should have thought of that earlier, check the cam timing. If the valves aren't closing at the right time, it could explain your low compression numbers. Its kinda a long shot, since I don't think I've ever had a motor jump timing that easily, but its worth checking.