For the past couple of months since I purchased this car I've been dealing with some minor problems, but now a new one has cropped up, and I'm not sure what it could be at this point. Yesterday morning, the car was working just fine. I had just installed a new dizzy rotor, the night before, as the old one had been having trouble staying put. After leaving work, about 5 hours later I noticed that the car was having trouble climbing the hill to get on to the freeway, and then once I got on level ground it had trouble shifting into 3rd gear/going above 60. The closer I got to home the worse the problem got until it seemed as if every time I brought the car to a complete stop it was going to die, but it never did.

After getting home I checked the dizzy cap/rotor (I had a problem in the past where water got into the cap, and caused a similar condition), but there was no play in the rotor. I did notice that the cap looked a little warn, and that there were stress marks around some of the metal nodes. I ended up replacing the cap, but the problem persisted.

The next morning, with the help of my uncle, we did some more diagnostics. We checked to see if any of the vacuum tubes had a crack, they didn't. We checked to see that each of the sparks were firing correctly, which they were, and then we checked to see if we had a constant pressure among the cylinders, which we did (around 185-190). We did noticed that one of the seals had failed causing one of the spark plugs to be covered in a fair bit of oil, but my uncle ruled out that it would cause this big of a problem. He also noted that the spark plugs seemed to be burning normally.

After all of this we still did not find any real problem, and now are turning to the web to get some other opinions. I have also recorded a video of what we are experiencing.

 

Did you replace the spark plugs. Oil fouled plug doesn't fire.

You have compression so the trouble is either fuel or spark and you did say one plug is oil soaked.

Also, just as an FYI. The good compression doesn't rule out old tired rings. The oil will seal up the rings giving solid compression numbers but still put enough oil into the cylinder to cause stuttering. The easy way to check this one is when you pull the spark plugs, lower the piston to BDC and shine a light down through the spark plug hole. If you have oil filling the Piston 2 Wall clearance, it's a pretty solid indication the rings aren't scraping oil back down.

I know this as my 95 civic slowly fouls the #4 spark plug this way and there is a small stutter when cold and idling.

In your case, I suspect you put the oil fouled plug back in and it's now severely missing on the cylinder.

If you put fresh plugs, then please provide details on how you checked your spark.

 

I'm SP's uncle helping out on this job. We took off the distributor (dizzy) today and found some washers that were lost when the rotor screw came undone.

These washers had found their way between the distributor crank angle cam and sensor and the ignition trigger. The cam had noticeable chips in it.





Where loose washers were found and minor damage to the crank angle cam.


Naturally we removed the washers, I did what I could to clean up the crank angle cam, cleaned and blew out the interior of the distributor.

One of the behaviors we're seeing, the engine will most the time idle smoothly and if you slowly accelerate it, it will remain pretty smooth up to a high RPM, however if you accelerate it quickly it'll run rough like it's missing.

Is there a centrifugal timing advance function? 'in the old days' there was a both centrifugal and vacuum advancing done to the engine timing.

This miss fire feels distributor related. The oil that was on the spark plug was from a leaking oil seal at the plug base, the plugs looked like they were burning normally, one just got messed up when I removed it to check the compression.

What the compression told me was that there wasn't a dead cylinder.

Like the one above - note how smoothly the engine runs if you accelerate it slowly but how roughly it runs when the accelerated quickly.