Alright. Well, still clueless. I solved one problem, but one still remains.
Juan is awesome. He suggested I test my compression tester. I should have thought to check something so simple, but it slipped my mind. I hooked it up to shop air, and the gauge was working fine. But, I did find a problem with the little schrader valve used to release the pressure in the gauge between tests. It was sticking open, and releasing the pressure. I'm guessing that's why the gauge was bliping quickly and then falling off when I was testing the car with the stock cams in last night. I plugged the schrader valve and the gauge is working fine now.
After I fixed the gauge, I ran another test on the car with the stock cams installed. 145ish across the board. I double checked each cylinder just to make sure. I'm thinking cool, at least the stock cams are reading like I would expect them to on a new motor with 500 break in miles on the clock. This pretty much confirms without a doubt that my timing is good, my rings are good, and there are no bent valves, right??
So, I swap the HKS 272s back in again, and run another test. Zero on all 4 cylinders. Not a f***ing bit of pressure in the cylinders. After I rolled zeros across the board again, I triple checked the compression gauge. I even adjusted my air regulator on the compressor up and down so I could see the gauge was actually reading accurate. The gauge is fine, but apparently, the car is not.
I'm relieved to know the car is fine with the stock cams. But, I'm not gonna roll around forever on stock cams, so I need to figure out WTF is going on. I'll just post up some more info in hopes that someone here can look at all the pieces, and maybe see something that I'm missing...
The cams are HKS 272s. I bought these used from Nate Crisman, who said they came out of his 92 AWD Auto track car.
The exhaust cam reads M006 (which correlates to a 272 from everything I can find).
The intake cam reads M 272. The 272 is engraved, like most other HKS cams I've ever seen.
The cylinder head rebuilt by Dale Morss Machine in Pensacola. He told me it was was hot tanked, passages cleaned, decked, 3 angle valve job, oil port mod, new valve seals, BC1100 valve springs, and upgraded manifold studs. I installed 3G revised lifters, and initially, the stock cams. The only thing I checked before I installed it was the deck surface. It checked out fine per the procedure I followed outlined in the FSM. Here are a few shots of the head before I installed it. Maybe someone can see something that looks off that maybe I didn't.
I'm at a loss here, guys. I'm still thinking I need to pull the head. I had a HKS 272/264 combo in 1813, and they ran in the car without issue. There are guys here on the board running 272s without issue, so I know there's something odd going on here. I can only figure the head is somehow out of spec. Why else would the HKS cams zero out my compression? Any suggestions would be awesome. Thanks in advance.