HELP NEEDED! misfires(?) no power

Help! My 88 XJ isn't running right at all. It was running fine a couple of weeks ago when I parked it for a short while. While it was parked I changed the starter and battery cables. I also worked on putting the emission hoses, (CCV etc) back together and washed the undercarriage and engine. After that I took it for a drive and that's when I noticed some problems. It was backfiring and such. I thought it was water in the distributor cap, pulled it and sure enough it was wet. I sprayed some WD-40 in there and drove home. Still had the same problems. So, I park it and let it sit for another week. (I have 3 cars so I have to rotate.)

This morning I figured it would be good and dry so I pulled it up in the driveway, blew out with air the distributor and wiped the inside of the cap. I thought it was fine until I started driving to work.

It's pretty good up to 2000 RPMS, although the power is a little low. At 2100 the power drops significantly and it backfires, (for lack of a better term.) I'm ok at fixing things, but suck at diagnosis. Can someone help me?

I used the work misfire, but I"m not sure if that's what it really is. At 2000 it's running fine. Then when you push teh accellerator to the floor it only goes up to about 2100 RPMs, power drops and there's a little "pop pop" sound. You can let off and just let it putter around at 1500 or 2000 RPMs and it's back to the way it was.

i would at least replace the cap, rotor and plug wires. if you pull the wires off the cap you may see corrosion under the boots. especially if you had moisture inside the cap

did you happen to get the tps wet? if so it may need to be replaced and set-up to factory specs.

Loss of power related to speed would indicate crank position sensor as well as TPS. Maybe that the wiring to the CPS or TPS is damaged/corroded?

I replaced the Dist Cap and Rotor. Learned it doesn't have points and stuff.

I found that my blow by problem is terrible. Cleaned the TB and Air Box. Routed the hose on the front of the valve cover to a bottle to catch blow by as a temp fix.

Check the compression on all 6 cylinders, about 110 on them all. So, that means no blown head gasket right?

Tried my best to check all the vacumn lines and make sure they're good. The look ok to me.

Where's the TPS? I was thinking about replacing the fuel filter tonight.

Oh, and the plugs looked pretty good. I replaced them with Champion plugs last November. The plug wires looked ok too. One was a little questionable, but shouldn't be terrible.

dan give me a call about this problem
check your pm

I didn't get a chance to change the fuel filter, but I noticed that it's running better. The problems still there, but I"m good up to 3500 or 4000 rpms now. strange eh?

This sounds similar to my problem I had awhile back. The diognostics for that was a new TPS.

Only difference is my RPMs would drop off randomly (2000, 0, 1800, 0, 2100, 0, ect.).

Worst case you find out the TPS doesnt solve anything, and you have an extra to carry out on the trails.