Long painful process. You can see I first posted back in Feb 2019. When I was trying to troubleshoot the car, I made the wrong assumption that mechanically the top end of the build was good. As it turns out, the machine shop that told me valves were good and that they passed both a pressure test and vacuum leak test, either lied to me and did not do the tests, or I screwed up something in the build. Turns out that cylinder 8 was only at 30 lbs. compression. Shooting oil in the cylinder did not change the compression reading.

Pulled the heads off again and found a highly (Yelp) rated machine shop. They replaced all of the intake valves, repressed some loose guides and did a full valve job. Car runs great now. I mechanically passed a CA smog check this weekend, but failed due to a technicality (had the wrong sticker for my headers). Stupid state rules require me to get the correct sticker and rerun the test.

Moral of the story – Compression check, although a pain in the ***, are a necessary evil to eliminate obvious issues.

 

Glad you found it.