Nissan Repair: 1994 Nissan Altima died, wont restart, nissan altima, message board posts

Question
Von,
The other day my wife drove her '94 Altima into town. The car died on her but she was able to coast into a parking lot. She was able to get it started a few times, but the car would die again every time she shifted to drive (it has auto transmission). Finally, the car just would not restart at all. We had it towed to a mechanic. Fuel pressure was fine, and engine was getting a spark. However, when he checked the engine compression, he found that two cylinders were normal and two were low. As I recall, it was in this order, left to right: low, normal, low, normal, or it could've been normal, low, normal, low. At any rate, since the two low compression cylinders were not side by side, the mechanic believes that the problem is not the head gasket, but instead the timing chain. The fellow is a general mechanic, and thus isn't an expert in problems peculiar to Nissan.
I have seen message board posts from quite a number of Altima owners who have had a similar problem and the solution turned out to be the distributor. However, I've not read of anyone else with the same compression readings.
I went by the mechanic's shop on Saturday and removed the distributor cap, rotor, and the black cover that is behind the rotor, and found no trace of oil contamination. I removed the three screws that hold the thin piece of aluminum behind the black piece but it wouldn't budge and I didn't want to press my luck by forcing it so I just put the whole thing back together and left it alone. By the way, I did check to see if the rotor spinned when the engine was cranked. It does.
Based on my description, I would like to know if the problem most likely lies with the timing chain, or rather with the distributor. I would like to add that the car has 299,000+ miles on her.
Thank you so much.

Answer
Doug,

I would say both the timing chain has skipped a tooth or two and that the distributor is most probably contaminated.  But, for starters, have the mechanic remove the valve cover and roll the engine over to top dead center and check mechanical valve event to verify that timing has jumped.  From the sounds of it that is what has happened.  This is common on your car.  And, with 299,000 miles I would think a wrecking yard motor replacement would be the cheapest solution.  Check on-line and see if one can be sourced cheap.  It is much less money to plug and replace your tired motor with a low mileage used one...