Long story short I have been working on an old Cadillac 472 engine, runs good, seemed a-ok but a compression test showed a zero on cylinder 2. (Completely supprised because it seemed to run smoothly). Leak down test showed bad intake valve, then I remembered hearing old “war stories” at the local legion when I was a little kid and one conversation in particular.. it was amongst a couple wwII mechanics and how they often had problems with warped valves on battle damaged returning b-17’s, but to get them ready again for the next day they didn’t have time to do a “proper” repair. So being the situation they were in they had figured out that they could feed rope into the cylinder at bdc on the bad cylinder and really crank down on the crankshaft to press the valves back into approximately the right place and the pressure pulses of combustion would resettle them back into serviceable limits. Since I was dead in the water waiting for parts to do a proper repair I figured what the heck, I’ll try it just to see, and after “roping” the cylinder it went from zero to 30psi on the compression test. I then idled it for a while and there was a progressively increase of rpm for the thirty minutes I did it. I intend to try getting a few hours on it (ground vehicle) over the next week to see if it comes back, I doubt it will get back to standard, but then again I’m already extremely surprised by the positive results it has produced so far. I intend to pull the engine apart as soon as parts arrive, but will try to get as much data as possible until then.
