OT Car Repair Gurus, Help Needed

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Cylinder mis-fire due to piston ring gap lining up. $4,980 to fix. That sound right?

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If this is the estimated repair cost from a dealership, find an independent mechanic shop.

If you're in the Baton Rouge area, check out Tinh at Highland Car Care, or Jason at K&M Automotive.

Both people (and places) are very honest, and do great work.

There are enough people who post here that are from Houston and can recommend some honest car repair shops.

Forget the dealership.

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Jason at K&M Automotive

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This. 100%. They do good work and have always been honest with me.

ETA: Nevermind since it's Houston, but I stand behind that recommendation for BR.

When the gaps line up it allows a lot of blow by resulting in a loss of compression in the affected cylinder. It can/will cause oil to get into the combustion chamber. Have you noticed any extra fumes coming out of the exhaust? If so, then the diagnosis sounds right.

Other symptoms that should be present as well such as feeling down on power and excessive oil consumption. If it's been burning more oil recently, you probably have a blow by occurring.

The only way to change rings is to pull the affected piston from the block and if you are going to do that, then you might as well change them all. They are going to have to remove the engine to do that job so it's not cheap.

Id bring it to a local shop first and get a second opinion, just to make sure the diagnosis lines up. Lots of other things can cause misfires, such as a bad coil/coil pack, nicked plug wire, bad plug, etc.. I would have a second set of eyes confirm the ring diagnosis before Id go further.

Band-aid fixes would be to change the plug after every oil change as they will get fouled up from excessive blow by. I've got an old beater 95 GMC K2500 that i've been doing this on for a couple of years now.

I would find a mechanic outside of a dealership (stealership in my view) to do the work.

Check around with friends to see if they recommend someone for the job. Either way, it's not going to be cheap even if they only break the engine down just far enough to pull the piston, hone the cylinder and install a fresh set of rings and reassemble.


The easiest way to find out which cylinder is the issue is to pull the spark plugs and look for the one with oil on the ceramic part of the plug.

My wife's Pilot had the same issue. You can go on the Honda forums, and they will tell you some things you can do. This is what we did. On a trip to Fla around Tallahassee it started missing. We found a dealership the next morning, told them we were on our way to Orlando. They said we checked everything it was the top right cylinder that had a fouled plug. The hardest to get to. They changed the plug and cleared the codes and sent us off with no charge. They said it was a known issue and now Honda knows our car has it too.

It would only do it around town after a very long time because the oil had to build up on the plug. However, if we went on a long trip, it would happen usually on the way back. I bought a set of plugs and put that and some tools in the car. If it happened, I would just change that back plug, and everything was fine. It is a known problem. There was some warranty or recall on this by Honda, but it really didn't do much, because it usually occurs after 100k miles.

It was a pain, because it was the hardest plug to get to. I lost sleep the first time thinking new engine, etc. or we would have to get another car on our trip, but that dealership really helped us out. Try changing the plugs and the coil packs. Plug wires if they haven't been done in a while. If you don't travel too far in it, just everyday driving, it will last a year or more before it will show up again. I would change the plug before every extended trip. We drove to Illinois and it showed up about halfway on the return leg. We went eat, let the engine cool and I changed the plug in the parking lot, no problems.

Also, if you are having this problem, it won't be long before you have the converter issue. I read the forums and bought a plug extender for the sensor, put it on and reset the computer, it went away. We have to have inspection stickers here, so I had to figure it out. There are usually forums where tuners have figured everything out on that engine. It is the same V^ engine they use in most of their models, so you can look up the issue and someone has usually figures out a work around.

Bring it to another shop. But before you do that, get as much information from the stealership as you can and give that info to the second shop. Actual code(s) which caused the flashing check engine light. Ask them to provide the report from the scan tool. How did they determine the piston rings lining up? Did they do cylinder compression checks? If yes, ask for a report with the readings. Did they do leak down test? If yes, again ask for a report? Good luck.

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Cylinder mis-fire due to piston ring gap lining up. $4,980 to fix. That sound right?

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A cylinder mis-fire that causes you CEL to flash is generally always from two things:

1) bad fuel injector not firing and detected by ECM

2) Bad coil/plug/wire and plug not firing and detected by ECM


How did the mechanic come to the conclusion of a bad piston ring gap?! Technically yes, you could have low compression in one cylinder and he could of put a camera down the hole and seen an issue, but the injector and plug would still be firing and not cause the ECM to react how it did. And your rngine would sound awful

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Thanks. I’m in Houston.

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One of the most honest shops I've found in the Houston Area, this is in Cypress.

LINK /

Go to harbor freight and buy this LINK to tool that cost 30 bucks.


Pull the spark plugs and check the compression on the cylinders yourself. It will tell you if your engine is bad. If all the cylinders read good you know 100% it's not your "engine" but some peripheral issue.