I had my uncle check out my car today and he says he thinks I have a burnt valve. I changed everything including, the intake, plugs, wires, coil, fuel pump and the opti. Now I had my uncle take a look at it and he is saying burnt valve. The car has a shake/miss at idle, ticks on the driver side down the highway and is down on power. This all happened after my fuel pump went out. When my fuel pump went it did not go all the way instead the passenger side ran rich and the driver side ran lean. I did go wot a few times with the bad pump. Could I have burnt a valve? Is their any way to know for sure with out a compression test, I would hate to pull the headers. If it turns out to be a valve I am going LE1 heads.

 

The only way to tell for sure is to do a compression/leak down test. You don't have to pull the headers for that, just pull the plugs....

It strikes me as odd that the fuel pump failing could cause a lean condition on one bank and a rich condition on the other...it should have simply run out of fuel.

A lean condition should not result in burned valves but it can hole a piston. Having a valve hang open allows it to overheat and 'burn'. The valve cool as they contact the head even if it is for portions of a second at a time.

 

If you think you have an exhaust valve hanging open, you can sometimes detect this by temporarily grounding the coil wire so it won't fire, then listen back by the exhaust for an irregular exhaust pulse or put a piece of paper over the exhaust pipe and see what the rhythm does. For an intake valve, pulling off the intake bellows and then open the throttle body and crank the engine while listening for a whoosh sound as it turns over. It also will also crank unevenly as one cylinder will crank faster than the others because it doesn't have good compression. You might need to warm up the engine first because sometime an engine will do this when it's cold but work OK when it's warmed up.

 

While I agree it shouldn't cause a rich condition on the one side, my dad's car did have a lean condition on the driver's side because the fuel pump was going bad. It's like it'd use all the fuel on the passenger side and by the time the fuel got to the driver's side the pump wasn't pushin enough so it leaned out on the driver's side.

 

I know the fuel pump was odd, but that is what it did. Also, When I first installed the cam I screwed up on the timing with a double chain. http://www.turbomalibu.com/drivetrai...g_settings.gif I put the crank at the blue key hole and lined up the red dot with the cam gear (I know its way off). The headers were bright red; even burned right through the driver side header. I drove it installed incorrectly for over 200mi.

 

Looks like I am going to do a compression/leak down test and will be pulling my headers, because I can not get the number 5 and 7 cylinders with my bbk shorty headers. I will be doing this next weekend. Darn car is really being a pain in the butt; every one in my family is starting to talk all kinds of crap. I hope I get it running good soon.

 

Dude why would you use a malibu site when there's shbox.com for all your reference needs...