I was driving on the freeway and my timing belt broke. I replace the timing belt and I am having problems. The engine is shaking and running rough. Cylinder 2 seems to be not function. I check the valves so it cannot be the vavles and they seem fine two cylinders are white and cylinder 2 is black and cylinder 1 was also black but not as much as cyclinder 2. The injectors are working and the sparkplugs are working fine. The timing is right i double check it. What else could be the problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Year Make and model?

Did you put a hole in your piston?

 

What do you mean by you checked the valve? did you just look at them or did you pull the head?

try do a leakdown test and see if any valves are leaking.

 

The car is a 95 ex (vtec) 4 cylinder. We just pulled the head and the valves seem to be fine, they are all seated properly, and move the same amount for all 4 cylinders.

Cylinder 2 seems not to be firing because when we remove the spark plug wire from the cylinder it runs the same as without it. Also the valves on the intake side of the cylinders are all white except for the 2 in cylinder 2, they are black like the exaust valves.

The piston has no noticable wear from where a valve hit it or anything like that.

We changed the spark plugs, we can hear the wire grounding to the outside of the cylinder as we pull the wire out. We exchanged injectors and tested the ground and positive wires on the injector.

Before taking the engine apart we also changed the timing belt advanced and retarded by 1 then 2 notches in each direction, with no improvement.

The car runs fine at freeway speeds, pretty much anything above 2000 rpms feels like it did before, no noticable change in power that I can tell. Below 2000 rpms you can hear it misfiring pretty bad.

Any ideas? Thanks again.

P.S. I did not take off the bottom cover off the timing belt, and dont really know what the balance belt does, so I did not check that the guys at the shop put the belt on correctly.


Modified by drycreekgsr at 6:49 PM 5/29/2006

 

Bump

 

Your valves may be bent just enough to stop them from moving freely at low rpm. You did say the #2 cylinder was fireing, right?

 

It should be, there is spark, and there should be gas.