[Cwoods]

After driving my 2005 spec-v down the atlantic city expressway at about 80 mph for about 1 1/2 hours I pulled off the exit ramp and down shifting, and immediately noticed that I was down on power. By the time I had gotten to the toll booth and accelerated out I could here and feel that my car was down on power and hurting. I ran it this way to my house and the next day took it to a shop for a compression test. I was down on compression at around 80 psi in cylinder 4. So I trailored the car up and brought it to a guy who does valve work to let him take a look at it....Now somewhere between my house and that guys valve shop the car began running absolutely fine. By the time I got to the valve shop I was convinced the problem was gone. We did a compression test at the shop and it was 145 psi for all cylinders. WHAT HAPPENED?? Is 145 normal?



Has anyone had similar experiences??? Was this just carbon build up on my valves that broke down and eliminated itself??? Car has 133 tho. on the dash.

 

[i68k]

145 is low, sounds like your losing compression somewhere, you should be up around 170-180psi. maybe headgasket, valve seals, pistons rings, or all of them. do you still have the stock header or something? maybe when you got 80psi there was something wrong with the tester or it was leaking or something.

 

[Cwoods]

Well I am fairly certain that all my seals are okay and my head gasket is not blown. I see by searching around that a lot of guys are getting 170-180ish too. My engine also has 133 thousand on it, so I'm thinking it's just normal engine wear, and probably has to do with the rings. I'm not in the financial position to do rings because this would also mean I would have to pay for machine work to bore out the cylinder... And even with this engine at 145 it STILL pulls ridiculously hard for a 4 cylinder. I would like to get it up to the correct specs