Its me again all......

I have a few things that I need to ask about my newly accquired vehicle. As before in an earlier post, I bought a 91 Civic Si HB for what I told you guys before was $500. In fact, I actually bought the car for $200. When I went to pick up the car it needed and altanator, belt, and battery. After I installed the parts I drove it home from St. Louis to Kansas City (avg. 4 hrs). The car had died a few times, but it was due to the faulty altanator I bought. Once I got it home I replace the ALT and it is runnning okay now. When the car was purchase the buyer did state that the car was running on 3 cyclinders, but it seemed fine driving on the highway home. But when I am at a stop the car sputters a bit. Tuesday 2/11- I changed the oil, distributor box, rotor, and spark plugs. The spark plugs were the only thing that i think needed changing. Since I bought the car I have driven it almost everyday on 3 cyc. and seems to be fine.

I did a compression test and #3 did not have any compression. The rest were all 150.
Now my question to you is what do you think may be wrong with the vehicle. Is the compression # supposed to be reading at 150 or should it be higher. I did a search and found nothing on A6 motors and all the #'s i seen were no where near 150 on other vehicles.

And last but not least, this maybe a sillie question..but its better to know. What does it mean that I am runnning on 3 cyclinder. My guess is its not working. But I need a technical explanation. Oh and is it okay to drive only on 3 cyclinders??

Any help will greatly be appreciated.......here are some new pix I took below at work.

 

The compression on an a6 is about 175 stock, are u burning oil? If not its most likely somethgin on your valve train ruining your compression.

 

Not burning oil, not that I know of yet. As stated, I changed the oil a few days ago and haven't checked it yet. I was thinking it was maybe a valve train also.

 

You are running on three because you have mud flaps.......no just kidding, it isnt very healthy to run on 3 cylinders because the engine was made to run on 4 and that is just putting alot more stress on everything, did you check you plug wires if they are pluged all the way in and if not that then it could be your alternator, there is a litlle disk insie that spins and sends a charge to every wire when it is their turn on the rotation soooooo, you could not be getting a spark. Feel the headers and see which cylinder is not running it will be the cold one.

 

your engine would shake like crazy if it were running on 3 cylinders, esp since it only a 4 cylinder.

to run on 3 mean that for some reason it is not going through all the the 4 strokes. (it is still spinning but since there is no compression you wont be able to get the force required on the power stroke of the engine.

 

The car doesnt shake that bad......and depending on what you mean as a bad shake. To me it doesnt seem to shake that bad. The car runs on the highway fine without any problem and a few times I have pushed it to 7500K and no problem. And with the altenator, I bougth new one already and replaced it. There is no more problem w/ the altenator. I just wanna see if anyone can figure out what it can be before i pull the to swap a new a6 on.

 

k first of all... its imposible to have 0 psi of compression if u do the check the correct way.. u dont have compression at all unless uhave a hole in one of the valves the size ot the spark plug hole... even with a crak on a valve... or a lil hole... u should get some sort of compression and then it should just leak away quickly.... i wiould just go back and check that again

running on 3 cyl means that one of the cylinders its not combustting
wich can be caused by low or poor spark., too much fuel , no fuel at all, leak of compression etc

if at a light it sputters, i will check that the car its timed correctly... bc if it runs fine on highway, a car running on 3 cyl will be making a very hesitatin run..
beleive me i have run my car in 3 cyl when i didnt get spark on #1 and the car lost power very badly and run badly..... running on 3 its something u will notice that will loose power...