SCott300

iTrader: (2)

Back ground info
-1992 SC300 5-speed 172,000 miles
-I bought the car from the original owner and then sold in back in 2006/7 with roughly 120k miles in great condition. I purchased the car back about 5 years ago (not nunning) from a different guy than the one that purchased it from me, so I was not able to ask what happened when it stopped running.
-The Car has sat in my garage on on jack stands ever since
The Breakdown
-a couple months ago I finally started working on the car to get her running again. The oil pan had about 1 1/2qts of oil in it, oil had spewed all over the engine bay, and the head was completely trash. Both cams were warped, one of the cams was so overheated it damn near welded itself into one of the journals.
Replaced parts list
-New/refurbished head and valve train (stock). had it checked out by a very reputable machine shop as well
-New head gasket, valve cover gaskets, cam seals, front main seal,
-OBX header, the factory one had rusted through, O2 sensors
-Water Pump, timing belt, serpentine belt, radiator, radiator hoses, thermostat, OBX polished pulleys, arp head studs, OEM crank pulley sprocket, 6 new injectors, fuel pump, fuel filter, spark plugs, dist cap and rotor, spark plug wires
-Thoroughly cleaned all of the carbon build up that was caked inside of the Throttle Body and intake manifold, cleaned the MAF sensor and IACV with MAF sensor cleaner, completely drained the gas tank and had to clean it bc of rust, cleaned the tops of the pistons and inspected the piston chambers (all looked good)
-The Story
We (buddy and I) tore the motor down and put it all back together. Unbenounced to me at the time, my buddy did not torque the ARP's to proper spec. The factory head studs spec is 25ft/lb's and the arp's is 80ft/lbs, so he thought 60ft/lb's would be sufficent.....wrong! We were able to start the car for the first time in 5 years and it sounded great...for a few minutes, started to sputter and then died. We turned it over a couple more times, it would run for a minute and then die. I pulled the oil cap off and we had chocolate milk..fawk.
So we drained the oil, tore the motor down again, I went ahead and swapped the HG to an OEM TT HG while we were there...again...changed out the spark plugs (just incase the others got foiled), torqued the head studs down to 80, and set the timing on the dist. While the head was off, we re-inspected the pistons, all looked good, and we cleaned the top of the block again. This time the car was a total ***** to start, finally fired once we held the throttle wide open, sounded like ****, sputtered and died. The only way I can get the car to start and run is if i play with the throttle cable that is mounted to the passenger side wheel well, the car lobes like a V8 with a big cam and then eventually dies. I have tripple checked the vaccum lines as well.
The bottom end is still completely stock and I havent done a compression test on it yet. Since the cylinder walls looked ok, is there still a chance that the piston rings have failed and would that cause the issues that I am having? My next guess is that we bent a valve some how when we pulled the head off the second time, but not sure.
Any and All help would be greatly appreciated because my next step involves a bunch of gas and a match!!!!!
Thank You in advance
Scott