rallycj

Hey guys,

First post to the forum, but I have been lurking here for a while. I was wondering if any of you could shed some light on a situation:

My girlfriend’s 1997 prelude sat for a couple of months (we have been busy replacing most of the suspension components, and various other worn out pieces). We went to start it up after completing our projects, it tried to fire, then the engine noise changed drastically (think sucking noise), and it died. Further attempts got no where. The car turned over, got fuel, got spark, wouldn’t start. While trying to figure out what happened it became apparent that the timing belt had never been replaced (the car currently has 140,000 miles on it). At that point I assumed the worst and pulled the timing cover. The belt and cam timing appeared to be fine, but I of course replaced the belts anyway. Got everything back together, and the car still wouldn’t start. At that point we did a compression test (which we probably should have done in the first place), and two of the cylinders were at 45psi, while the other two were at 120psi. A leak down test pointed to the valve train, so we pulled the head and took it to our favorite machine shop. They have poked around with it, and say it is in great shape, except all eight of the exhaust valves are bent.

I am guessing that something happened with the belt (either stretched, or the exhaust cam skipped a tooth), as that seems to be the logical explanation. What is weird is that I looked at things pretty closely taking it apart. The belt looked to be in decent shape and the cams appeared to be aligned properly. Even weirder is that there are no marks on the pistons. Whenever I have seen bent valves in the past I have usually seen mangled pistons as well.

Have any of you guys seen anything which would cause exhaust valves to bend besides a timing belt/contacting piston issue? Could this be something weird with an oil pump freezing up, or some weird vtec thing? I am guessing no, but the last thing I want to do is slap the engine back together and have it do the exact same thing all over again. The car ran fine before it sat for a couple of months. I am hoping that this was simply an unlucky coincidence (that it happened after sitting so long),but I am not super knowledgeable of Preludes, so I figured I would run this by the experts and see if any of you had ever experienced a similar situation.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

-CJ