Car: 1991 Jetta GL. 8v 1.8L. Problem: I was driving back to college last night. About 20 minutes into the 2 hour drive it just starts "missing". Nothing much. I'm in 5th gear and every so often it'll lurch forward. Just like it's missing. In the literal middle of nowhere[0] I have no option but to press on. Well after about an hour it starts to get really bad. It's slowing me down more than it's speeding me up.... But only in 5th gear. If the RPM's are low I have no power. So I rev it up and take it at 3/4th gear and it runs "fine". I get into the next town and it stalls at a stop light. Thankfully it restarts without a problem, but I have *no* acceleration, it'll just idle. So I sit in neutral press the gas all the way to the floor. It sits there for a few seconds then finally 'clears it's throat' and revs up as a normal engine should. I baby it home and take a look under the hood. Around the manifold gas recycler (WTF is that called again) there is oil sputtering out bad and it's even blown some out in a nice spray pattern. For some reason it doesn't have much power in low RPM, it's like I have to keep it up above 3k to even get it moving and keep it going. Occasionally it'll just stall at idle. But restart right away with no problems. When It is choking out and I do flood it I did notice some smoke out the back. This was by the night, so I can't see the color yet. This has been a good little car to me. I bought it for 800, and I've probably put 1,200 into it[1]. I'm a pretty good mechanic, but I'm still a bit weary about diving into the engine. Not to mention I don't have a garage and my Apartment complex won't take kindly to me working on it in the lot. Hypothesis: I have 3 basic theories about what's going on. Ranging from, "oops, lets get that fixed" to "Start looking for a new car". 1) My valve stem seals are bad. I've known this. And just was always on the "to do" list of things to fix. But I never got around to it. One of the things has finally just blown away, allowing massive amounts of oil into the engine. High RPM cleans this out. Low RPM it'll run fine. The last time I saw problems like this was when I put too much oil into my '65 Type II. The extra was dumped into the air filter. That kept getting sucked into the engine, and killed any power I had. 2) Blown head gasket. Not something I want. But the lack of compression would well, be due to this. I did have a Colt Vista that cracked a head. The only difference is it would never restart since it never had any pressure. I'm also not losing any coolant. 3) The rings just called it quits. Only think of this because it would introduce oil into the combustion and would lose power.
I'm open to entertain any ideas about what's going on. Hopefully it'll be cheap to fix. Otherwise I may start looking for another car and part this one out.
[0]. Between Terre Haute and Lafayette, going the back way of 59/231. [1]. Exhaust, front wheel bearings, brakes, Euro Lights.