Hello all. I would love to preface this with an apology for the long post. I’ve been fighting a misfire for about 3 weeks and I’m starting to feel like and insane person.
here’s the story:
it’s a 1995 ford ranger 2.3L dual plug with thunderbird 2.3T forged pistons and a turbo. It’s a mildy “built” truck. It’s on a 98 ranger 2.5 ecu tuned with binary editor that has been done professionally by the Creator of the moates quaterhorse.

It was doing outstanding until about 3 months when it developed a miss on startup and a lean condition on hard pulls, which later turned out to be coolant leaking into the cylinder from a cracked head on cylinder 1. Parked it and waited on a new head for 3 months. Got it back together the first time and it was low compression on a hole. Which turned out to be a folded gasket from install
new gasket, buttoned up, still misfired.
turned out to be the injector adaptor on cyl 3.
soldered in actual connectors and boom. Still misses. I believe it’s missing on cyl 1 and it appears to be flooding.. the brand new plugs are dark and wet on cylinder 1 only. I went to pull the upper intake to swap injectors around and see if the problem followed, and I discovered what appeared to be oil in the #1 runner, but no evidence in the actual intake chamber on the head… I’m at my wits end.

heres what I know;
140psi on all 4 cylinders (8.7:1 compression ratio)
It is in time, and has been triple, about to be quadruple checked.
it has fresh plugs, gapped at .028 for 14psi of boost (ran perfectly on that for 6 months)
coils and wires are in working order and each one has been tested individually at the coil and at the plug as well as swapped with ones from a running truck.
it has the proper fuel pressure (40 psi priming, 36 psi at idle)
the head was fine through before I got it (lapped valves, new seals etc)

i do not believe this to be a tune/ecu related issue as nothing has changed on that side of it. The only part that is different is the head. (And technically the cam that came with it but from my understanding all 2.3 cams were the same from 95-97

I have literally done everything in my power to do. And re looking at everything doesn’t do me much good. I’ve had the head off 2 different times after getting it back on chasing this ghost. If anyone has ANY and I mean ANYYY kind of input that might guide me in the right direction I would greatly appreciate it!!! Thank you in advance (also yes, each time the head came off it received a new gasket and bolts)

 

I had a weird misfire that ended up being a bad ignition switch. The part was around 30 bucks and took like 30 minutes to replace. Mine was visibly busted but i started getting a clue when my radio would randomly quit working