On Saturday I was driving back from my cousins house. Same route, everything normal. I realize I'm doing 80 & decide to push a bit further & get to 90. However, as I'm slowing down to the speed limit, I notice that my check engine light is blinking.

Now I know what that means & I pull over to see what's going on. I turn the car off & on & try to drive it. Around 30 mph, I start to notice a loss of power & I hear a popping noise every 3 seconds or so from the exhaust. Knowing it's a misfire, I get my car towed home & try to find out wrong. I do the general misfire test & find out that cylinder 4 is misfiring. Thinking it's my spark plugs & wires, I go to buy new ones & change them. Unfortunately, that doesn't fix the problem. I'm pretty sure my fuel injectors aren't the cause. Could the distributor be the cause? Did going that high of speed cause something to go wrong?

I'm in the position where I want to fix what's wrong but I don't want to waste money on replacing something that doesn't need replacing. I'm only 20, money is pretty tight so any help is greatly appreciated.

 

buy/rent a compression tester. you can move the wire of the misfiring cylinder to another and see if it follows

 

If you're saying that #4 is completely dead, you could have a burnt valve. That would show on a compression test. A quick test you can do with no tools or no money is to disable the ignition by unplugging the harness wires (not the spark wires) at the distributor, then crank. If it doesn't sound normal, having a "once around" speed up of the starter, there's an internal problem with the engine such as a burnt valve.

 

Cylinder 4 has a spark but i would say it's weaker than the others. Would that make a difference? Also, I get a smell after I turn on the car, I can't determine if it's burnt oil or the smell of fuel.

 

diagnose.