Yesterday

While driving to Ashland from Jiffy Lube 2 days ago the engine light came on in the motor home. So, I decided I needed to call and likely go back to Medford the next day to check out what this meant. When I arrived they had a little device and it said, "Cylinder 8" which likely could mean anything. However, I decided to change the spark plugs in case that was a cause of number 8 misfiring. However, even after changing all the spark plugs and the wires when we started it up at idle speed one of the cylinders was misfiring, you could hear it blowing a misfire through the muffler. So, the man who had been changing the spark plugs was kind of upset about all this. I taught him a trick I had learned working on street racers in the 1960s. I told him to simply take off one spark wire at a time while the engine is off and then start up each time with one spark wire on a cylinder disconnected. Pretty soon, we saw it was cylinder 8 like the engine light had said. So, my thought was since the spark plug and wire had already been replaced that we might be looking at a burnt valve. So, my worry was that I might break off the valve completely and destroy the engine driving like that from Medford to Mt. Shasta. So, my solution was to remove the spark plug wire from the distributor so no spark could reach cylinder 8 at all. Thereby preventing destruction to the engine and only running on 7 cylinders over the Mt. Ashland pass. This worked but the engine ran pretty strange at lower rpm. So, I found I had to run the engine at higher RPM over the pass to make all this work. I had to run up hill at about 45 mph at a higher rpm to smooth out the engine so it wasn't so rough and to get enough power to push the motor home over the pass and down the other side to Yreka and then to Mt. Shasta.

But it worked. Now I have to find someone to do a compression check on my number 8 cylinder to see if it is actually a burnt valve or what that I am dealing with today?