Blown head gasket.

[airforcekid]

Not yet, all the machine shops were closed this past weekend so I couldn't get it surfaced. I dropped it off yestermorning and it should be done sometime today. My next day off is Wednesday so I am going to finish it up then! Can't wait to see how much better it runs because I was literally getting power from cylinders 1&4 so it should feel a bit more peppy. Also going to do some light porting on the intake manifold, exhaust and intake runners. It probably wont make a difference at all but why not while its out.

[airforcekid]

Ugh.

So I got the head, almost everything hooked up. But, now I have a new issue.

If I leave the car in the on position, the wiring going to I believe the ECU (just above where your left knee would be) the group of wires coming out of it start to smolder and burn the tape or whatever is holding them all together. I didn't mess with anything wire related other than unplugging sensors and such. Within 10 seconds the wires are melting the tape and their individual sleeves. Maybe bad wiring that got dry and cracked enough for the wires to touch eachother or give off current to eachother?

Lost again.

[FestYboy]

you have something out of place that's feeding power through the PCM (which is likely now dead).... i'm going to presume that you rushed this install... remove the battery, disconnect the harness at the PCM and repair the wires, get a spare PCM and before installing it, look for where the failure is.

[airforcekid]

No I didn't really rush it, it took me about 2 hours.
Now that I think about it my buddy was trying to get my dash lights working when I was pulling the head, maybe he messed something up. Im not sure.

[airforcekid]

OK so I finally got some time to get back to fixing my festiva, I stripped the wiring and rewrapped it, and the car is now running! It wont idle right now but I will get that figured out this weekend. But it is drivable and fun as ever.

[airforcekid]

Well sometime last night at work, for some reason, I remembered, that i forgot, to attach the big 1/2 inch vaccum line on the right side below the intake manifold which was the issue. The festy is running awesome, now that 4 cylinders instead of 2 are working as they should the car feels a lot better! Compression numbers pre-new head gasket were 110-43-46-113. I will post back with the new numbers. This thing is a tire roaster!

For now I am trying to figure out why the speedo is not working, it seems pretty simple as its a gear turning a wire turning another gear. I can not figure it out for some reason though. No begging for help just listing whats going on: If I hook up the wire to the speedometer and spin the gear with a drill, the MPH needle moves. OK I now know the wire is in good shape, lubricated it with some ground up pencil graphite for safe measures.

Now here is the problem, if I plug it into the transmission I get no reading on the speedometer. Yes it is hooked up as it should be, the wire is hooked up to the back of the instument panel. Maybe its an issue with the transmission itself, off to do more research...nthego:

[airforcekid]

Andddddd my wiring harness melted again, well i will be selling this one and I will pick one up again someday. The dude buying it just wants the body, and is going to give me 500 for it. Good deal considering I payed 200! So yeah, no more festivas for me. It was fun.

[tac]

Same thing happened to mine last summer. Warped head and blown head gasket.

[Festevil3]

tac, welcome to the site, post your location, what kinda' festy you rockin?