91 Accord engine started to miss last night

You are on the right track. Things you can do to nail this effectively and economically:

If the wires do poorly on a resistance check, replace. If you do not understand this, ask away.

If the wires are more than five years old, replace.

How old are the cap and rotor in miles and years? Are they OEM?

Use only the OEM recommended spark plugs, and only OEM wires, rotor and cap. These pay for themselves in the long run. (Believe me, I am cheap and learned the hard way.) They do make a difference in performance.

Regular poster here "Tegger" has a site with much good wisdom on it. See in particular

"Thom" wrote

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First telltale sign on a '91 might be red rust coating the inside of the distributor cap. The bearing goes bad and starts leaking dust. When it seizes, the timing belt breaks and you get a different car.

How often do you use injector cleaner? Might just be a sticking injector too.

'Curly'

motsco_ wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com:

That red dust was actually more a '92-and-up problem. The distributor was changed for '92 to mate with the all-new ECU. It's still worth checking for red dust, of course...

Thom wrote in news:ca65395e-7001-4a58-9f5e- snipped-for-privacy@e67g2000hsc.googlegroups.com:

Is your Check Engine light on?

Have you checked to see what the spark looks like? Is is purply-blue?

How old are the wires, cap and rotor? Are they OEM or aftermarket?

Cap and rotor were way old, I assume. Before I bought it. We were testing the spark on #2 cylinder, when we removed the wire, the car quit. Either we smoked the distributor, or it doed right there. We replaced it, and it is back to running bad, but it is running. We have tested the spark on all the cylinders, it is nice and strong, but number 2 cylinder is real weak. A compression test has revealed low to no compression on that cylinder. Looks like we burned a valve or something.

Thom wrote in news:2ed62107-2bd2-47d3-8c0d- snipped-for-privacy@j44g2000hsj.googlegroups.com:

Before you condemn the valves, check their clearances. You might get lucky and the valve is simply being held open and not yet burnt.

I thought these enginse were interference engines. Wouldn't the piston slap the valve it it were being held open?

Thom wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@i29g2000prf.googlegroups.com:

They /are/ interference engines.

But when I say "held open", I mean by one or two thousandths of an inch. That's more than enough to cause poor compression and valve burning with no danger at all of the piston hitting the valve.

Pistons whack the valves when the timing belt breaks, not when the valve clearances are off.