93 Wagon, 4cyl, burping
 

Hi there. Looking for some diagnostic help. I have a 93 Camry Wagon, 4 cylinder. 96,000 miles. One problem I have, but I don't know if it's related, is that I have a small leak in the head gasket, so the 4th spark plug sits in oil sometime; meanwhile, I get occasional blue smoke on start-up, so I'm thinking those are related.

Hopefully unrelated is the fact that, yesterday, the car began burping/hesitating. It does it most while accelerating in low gears. It's worse with the air on. When stopped, but in drive, it idles lower than usual and stutters a bit. In park, it's not as bad. Turn the air off and put in park, and it's barely detectable. Based on my limited knowledge, it seems like a fuel supply issue, but I could be way off. This just started yesterday (it wasn't gradual), and I had earlier gotten gas from a crummy gas station, so not sure if that's related.

Any thoughts?

Thanks so much,
Jeremy

The low idle/hesitation could be leaking HG and bad compression in related cylinder. I don't think you can properly diagnose until the HG is fixed. The miles are fairly low so it may pay you to fix this. You can try cleaning the idle air control valve which may inprove the idle. Shuting off the A/C and putting in park/neutral reduces drag so engine idle should improve. I would do a complete compression test to see if fixing would be worth it.

Thanks for the input, Pedro. Turns out all it needed was a new distributor cap and rotor, and I swapped out ignition wires while I was at it. Runs like new again!