2G 2g DSM No Compression

[Blakedwight4]

Long story short. I purchased an engine off facebook that was claimed to be completely rebuilt. I trusted the guy, and swapped it over. I've wasted countless hours trying to get it started with ecmlink, and in disbelief I've put off doing a compression test. I finally did one and it came back with 0-0-0-165... I have put so much time and thousands of dollars into this, assuming it would fire up. I also tried doing a wet test on one cylinder and it went up to 60ish. The car is obviously stuck at my apartment btw.

 

[dwb]

Have you verified mechanical timing?
My initial thought is bent valves. You could pull the valve cover and see if any rockers are loose or missing. Otherwise pull the head and really see what's going on.

 

[Blakedwight4]

You still think valves if compression on all that were 0 jump to 60 when I put oil in the cylinders?

 

[dwb]

Maybe not. You said one cylinder jumped 60, that still left 2 dead holes so I didn't put much stock in it. All three dead cylinders jumping 60 could be rings or HG. At very least, the head needs to come off to find out.

 

[Blakedwight4]

Maybe not. You said one cylinder jumped 60, that still left 2 dead holes so I didn't put much stock in it. All three dead cylinders jumping 60 could be rings or HG. At very least, the head needs to come off to find out.

The other two also only bump a little. There’s not another way to test other than removing the head?

 

[dwb]

Leakdown test?

 

[CrazyDave]

I would do as dwb said and perform a leakdown test. I have some small cameras that go down the spark plug hole to visually inspect the cylinders, fairly cheap on amazon. If compression jumped 60psi there is definitely something up with the rings, who knows how "loose" the engine was built i.e. ring gap.

How fast was the engine cranking when you did the compression test? I've had engines with the cylinders washed down from fuel that had very little compression, squirted some oil in them and finally got them to fire up.

Also as dwb said, I would pull the valve cover and verify that timing is set correctly first and foremost, you could have the timing off AND brand new rings that aren't seated yet, also make sure that the valves are moving freely and not binding up.

Do you know what happened to the engine before the rebuild?

 

[pauleyman]

If you didn't assemble this you might consider bleeding the lifters down and then run a leakdown. You might get lucky.
No way to know for sure without objective data or a physical look.