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Ok, so this happened.
There’s an annual rallye going from Germany to Jordan. The premise is to purchase a car below 1.111 € (basically clunkers) and of at least 20 yrs of age, pack it full of medicine and toys and such, and drive the piece of junk through 4.500 miles of wilderness, off road tracks, and other ghastly terrain to this year’s destination, donate everything (including the vehicle), and fly back home.
For this trip, we purchased three trucks, two euro Nissan Pathfinders and an Isuzu Trooper. I was working on the cars for 4 weeks, and three days before they were meant to leave for the desert, one of the pathfinders, a 1989 VG30i single point injected 3.0 V6, started to run on one less cylinder.
It had a previously undiagnosed problem with the timing sensor inside the distributor housing and therefore was running really rough, making these typical clicky noises engines make with their ignition set wrong.
Since we had to make a quick decision, I asked around in my mechanic circles, and one guy told me a quick and dirty trick to figure out a blown outlet valve in the cylinder head.
[b]
Turn the engine on and let it run. Hold a piece of thin cloth or toilet paper or a kleenex into the exhaust pipe. If the cloth / paper gets sucked quite vigorously in between strokes, you may well have a burned or broken outlet valve in your cylinder head. The “sucking” will follow an oscillatory pattern, as usually only one valve will go at a time.[/b]In a single point injection vehicle or carburetor vehicle, a gasoline injection problem would stall the engine altogether, so the diagnosis was either ignition (which we had replaced) or inlet/outlet valves.
We decided to leave the vehicle in Germany and went out to buy a replacement the very last day. All three cars made it eventually.
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