The car was purchased with 22K original (I hope but you never know based on some cases we have seen on the Boards) miles 3 years ago. The car now has 40K miles.

 

take it to billman.

with the procedures you say you will be doing, or if it's going to billman, you'll find the culprit in no time.

please keep us updated.

was the car ever run with low oil?

 

Yes for sure, I will be there at the end of the month. One of the main reasons I posted this is for everyone to learn or grab information from this. Hopefully whatever the cause is / was can be avoided in the future.

.... and I don't believe it was ever low enough in oil to cause damage or low at all.

 

UPDATE: I went over to Bill's this past Friday morning (no CEL, my guy who conducted the testing and initial compression test had cleared the light.) Bill hooked the car up and we got the 5 pending codes - P0301 through 4 and multiple misfires. Bill conducted his own compression test and we found the testing to be very similar with slightly higher #s than the original test - 224/224/180/224. At that point, he did a borescope examination of the 3rd cylinder. Here he found the cylinder wall had a minor line which he mentioned could be amplified by the lighting from the scope but it doesn't appear the line will be an issue and is definitely not the cause of the compression loss as determined by the leak down test. He popped off the VC cover and began inspecting all 8 exhaust valves. Here he found 1 of the valves for the 3rd cylinder had tightened up to about .004 from where it was originally set at .0011 (about 18K miles ago.) That valve was considered to be in burnt territory. When he did the leak down test we could clearly hear the air escaping right out of the exhaust. I am losing about 40-45% on cylinder # 3.

So far we do not have a clear cause but all fingers are pointing at a lean condition. Also, the valves on the 2nd and 4th cylinders were beginning to tighten up and leaning towards the same direction of the 3rd cylinder although they were nowhere near as bad. I have ran the car un-tuned for about 3 years now with a Hytech Header / Hytech Test Pipe(3" / 2.75") / 76mm and now this season a 70mm exhaust. The intake has always been OEM with a K&N filter and now the Spoon Snorkel with the OEM box modified. For some reason these mods have leaned out the car drastically. A secondary thought is a bad 02 sensor and also running WOT in different altitudes down at the dragon. I guess the lesson here is get tuned if you plan to run a decent amount of aftermarket parts especially higher end stuff that will change the motors behavior.

COURSE OF ACTION: The 8 exhaust valves were backed out to .012 where the car is safe to drive around. The bulk of the lean condition occurs at WOT, so no WOT until the repairs are completed. Bill will pull the head and replace all 8 exhaust valves and strongly recommended I run an A/F gauge. Before pulling the head we will be conducting some testing with a new O2 sensor and possibly try an OEM header and HFC on the car to see if that richens me up a bit. I will be replacing the MAP sensor as well.

Will keep you guys posted.

 

Thanks, for the update. Glad you are on your way to getting the car 100% fixed.