Smoking engine ?

[lynx42]

Originally Posted by rob love

To identify which cylinder has the stuck valve, you can start at the exhaust pipe and with the engine running, and your hand in the exhaust stream, feel for the side that has a miss. That will narrow it down to one side. Now for the shocking part. With the engine running, you need to pull the wires one at a time and see if there is a loss of RPM, or an added roughness to the idle. If the plug is pulled and there is no change, then you have found the bad cylinder. This was often referred to as a poor mans compression test. Replace the wire and move on to the next cylinder.

Instead of pulling the plug leads off why not just use a screw driver to short out the plugs one at a time. (That is if there is no insulating cap on the plug.) Just link the plug wire to the head with the shaft of the screw driver.