Adventuredude

I just purchased my first Maxima, a black loaded 95 with 191,000.The reason I was able to buy it so reasonably was because inspection was almost due. Complicating this was the check engine light on and the car had apparently been run the last 10,000 miles on 5 cylinders. I immediately pulled 1 coil wire at a time and chose the left rear as the bad one. This was verified by black gunk as over the spark plug. So I purchased a coil and new plug and installed them. It still had the miss but seemed a bit better unless it was my wishful thinking. Someone said I should have run and revved the engine with the plug out to remove more gunk. Should I take the plug out and try that or rent a compression tester from autozone or buy from harbor freight.Someone said spray the plug wire with water at night. Please help, since this is a fun car to drive even running on 5 cylinders. Also the inspection is not an issue it passes since this is a 95.

Fakie J Farkerton

iTrader: (51)

Purchased a car with a dead cylinder?
I don't see this going well.

Leaving the plug out to remove more gunk sounds like a joke.

4th gens are great, so it would be nice to see you bring this back from the dead, but it doesn't sound good.

How cheap did you get it for?

Adventuredude

I paid 300 hundred for the car, to be honest I thought I could use it as a beater, even powerslide on dirt roads for a couple months til the tags ran out.Then get that much from the friggin junk yard. I now have 650 including tagged for 2 years and realize how much I like this car. So want to fix it up the interior and exterior look great. When I had it on the lift so the shop could fix the exhaust leak it didnt seem to be rusty or leaking any fluids.

Fakie J Farkerton

iTrader: (51)

Sounds like you may have found a bit of a gem for only $300.

Fix it and

JoshG

300 bucks? dam, post pics of exterior and interior!

Adventuredude

I will take n post pics sion .In the meantime do you think I have a chance of getting this cylinder to fire?

max ride 41

iTrader: (4)

well, there's a reason it was 300 bux. i mean, fixable, maybe. i'm not the guy to talk to. talk to csair or wizard, those 2 know quite a bit about the vq.

Fakie J Farkerton

iTrader: (51)

Engine swap FTW.

I don't know anything about bringing a dead cylinder back to life personally or if it's even possible. I would assume that engine is done for.

Amerikaner83

iTrader: (17)

Swap in another VQ30

CS_AR

Can you run a compression test?

When I'm in doubt about an engine's health, I run a wet compression test as an initial test. I have also run a "leak down" test to check for leaking valves on a cylinder that is suspect for failure.

We are seeing injector failures that cause flooding and misfires on the cylinders where the injector o-ring has failed.

Last winter a dealer told me I needed a new engine when the problem turned out to be a couple of leaking injectors and a clogged up catalytic converter.

If you can provide compression numbers for each cylinder, then we will have some information to go on.

I have compression testers from Harbor Freight and AutoZone. I like the AZ tester a lot better than the one from HF.

The Wizard

iTrader: (43)

^Exactly what I was going to say. First and foremost, since you replaced the coilpack and the spark plug, don't rule out a bad injector, especially since you said the plug was black. Sounds like it's flooding and that cylinder is running rich.
So, it's cylinder 1 which means you'll have to pull the upper intake manifold off to get to the injector. The most recent injector job I did was also cylinder 1. Also, did you put in an NGK plug? Install an OEM coilpack?

Conversely, you can do a basic compression test of each cylinder. Then a full blown leak down test if the compression test results are inconclusive or you want to know the true and total health of your engine (rings, valve stems etc).

These tools are fairly cheap at Harbor Freight as stated. I believe you can even rent these tools from Autozone for free. Rather than me or CS_AR explaining how to perform these easy tests, watch these videos.

maximaham

iTrader: (1)

great vid

Adventuredude

Thanks for all the great suggestions, its dark when I get home so hoping to post my progress soon Trying to figure it out while there is still a great deal on a motor a half hour away. So worst case scenario I will b back asking the knowledgeable ones how to go about checking to see if the used engine is okay.