Pontiac Repair: 2000 Cavalier, spark plug wire, head gasket

Question
I have a 2000 Cavalier. 2.2 Engine. It was misfiring and we realized the head was leaking coolant so we had the head machined and changed the head gasket. It is still leaking now and one cyclinder is not firing at all. Do you have any ideas what could be wrong?

Answer
Hi Tia:

those old 2.2 liter engine were notorious for leaking coolant. Gm doesn't recomend having the cylinder head shaved down if it was indeed warped it needed to be replaced. I'll assume it's leaking coolant out the l/r corner of the head??? As for the misfire it could be a lot of things first off you need to check compression all the cylinders should be with in 10% of each other from the best to the worst. then you need to check for spark on all 4 cylinders if your missing spark you need to see what possibly a bad spark plug wire??? if you have spark on all 4 and it has compression the only other things is either a bad injector or an injector that is not getting a "pulse" from the computer. get a noid light and unplug each cylinder at a time or the one that you know is misfiring and plug the lamp in to the injetor harness the lamp should flash as theenegine is running if it does and you have all the rest of the things I mentioned it has a bad injetor. good luck :-}