Chip N Sawbones

I've got a 1989 2wd pickup with the 22RE. The engine has been burning oil by the bucketful, it runs rough, gets terrible mileage and doesn't produce much power. My compression tester finally arrived in the mail and I ran the test today. The numbers were:

.....Dry..Wet
1: 160 170
2: 100 105
3: 95 100
4: 0.....0

I'm not entirely surprised, since the spark plug for #4 fouled with carbon every 500 miles. What do I do now? I'm saving up money for a junkyard engine to swap in. A project like that is a little beyond my ability, so I'll have to pay a mechanic to do the swap. In the meantime, is there anything I can do to see why the cylinder has no compression, short of tearing the entire engine apart? Is it possible to plug the fuel injector for #4, remove the spark plug and just run on three cylinders?

Slowey23

its probably a stuck or burnt out valve and buy the sounds of it you've been running on only 3 cylinders for a while