[machintek]

I was considering pulling one plug wire at a time to see if the idle dropped. This would tell me if that cylinder was running correctly or not (if pulling the wire had no effect). If two adjacent cylinders had no effect then I would suspect that the cylinder head gasket was blown between them. I saw this too often with my MGB. I finally found a competition head gasket that solved this. I guess running Webers and such did not help the situation either. I also had a situation on a neighbor's Honda civic where when I pulled two of the four ignition wires (one at a time), the idle went UP. Turned out that there was a carbon trace inside the distributor cap causing 2 cylinders to fire at the same time and of course one of these was not at the correct position and fighting the correct running of the engine. Still planning on doing that compression test.

George
83 911SC Cab/Euro
82 928S
95 XJ6
70 914 well. most of it