Seeking opinions to an issue I'm having. I have a 95 H22 swap in my Civic that is turbo'd. A few weeks ago I noticed the car was smoking, under acceleration, deceleration, idling, but not really bad. I also noticed that oil was leaking from my turbo inlet and the housing was wet. This lead me to conclude the turbo seals were shot, allowing oil to pass through the intake, thus causing the smoking issue I have. I replaced the seals, cleaned out the intercooler and piping, put everything back together, and the issue still persists. It does smoke a lot from the breather on the valve cover, which means insane crankcase pressure, also explaining why my seals went bad in my turbo. But it really doesn't smell like burning oil or anything for that fact, however it's quite bad. I realize venting the engine via a catchcan isn't a bad idea, but is this just the problem? I did a compression check as well, and the cylinders were 210, 125, 145, and 190. I'm aware that H22 ringlands are notoriously bad, but find it odd that both center cylinders are down on compression. Is this just a bad head gasket between the cylinders? Is the "smoke" coming from my valve cover breather just steam from the bad had gasket? Has anyone had a similar issue with two connecting cylinders having low compression and if so, what did you find?

 

add some oil to the middle two cylinders and do a compression test again. i'm willing to bet your ringlands are shot.

 

Here's a curve ball. #2 cylinder was 145 and #3 was 125. I brought #3 to TDC and put a leak down tester on that cylinder. At an input pressure of 80psi, it had less than 5psi blowby. Here's where it gets strange, I tested #2, again with 80psi input pressure, and it had about 35psi of blowby. Why would the cylinder with the lowest compression have marginal blowby, while the next worst cylinder has pretty significant blowby? And to add to the issues, it won't hold an idle. When I took the plugs out, they were pretty black, so it's running rich for some reason. This thing's driving me nuts.