Here's the end result...Finally got time to work on the car last weekend, and given that the amount of work to do a compression test wasn't much different than doing oil injection into the cylinders, I just did the latter per Gus' procedure. I modified that slightly, based on another cylinder wash related post that I read, and decided to try doing the 4 cylinders on the driver's side first before doing all 8 if that was unsuccessful. The short answer is that cylinder wash was the issue, and doing 4 cylinders was sufficient to get the car started. As recommended, I removed the fuel pump fuse and cranked about 20 seconds to spread the oil, then I put the fuse back in and gave it a try. Three attempts at about 20 seconds of cranking with some rest time in between were unsuccessful, but I did hear some change in the cranking noise sounding like it was trying to fire up but not quite getting there. I'm guessing that may have been compression building in some of the cylinders. At that point, I stopped and contacted Gus, who encouraged me to give it a few more tries. On the second attempt after that, I got a rough start and gave it enough gas to stay running until it smoothed out. As expected, the car threw enough smoke for the first several minutes that I thought someone might call the fire department. After it was able to idle normally, we got to go for the first drive in about 6 weeks (with the power steering fixed!).

As for the spark/smoke that I mentioned in the above post that led me to thinking that I caused a problem by pulling a wire when installing the PS pump, that apparently didn't do any damage and apparently was unrelated to the non-start issue. Not sure what that was, but everything is working (including PS and air conditioning, which might have been the sensor/wire that I suspected to be damaged by pulling) and diagnostic codes cleared. One lesson for the future...don't pull wires.

Wanted to say thanks to all of you for helping me out with this and giving me the confidence to get into this level of mechanics without direct adult supervision! I took a bunch of photos of the procedure and recorded before/after audios of the engine cranking, which I plan to put into a separate post to help others who may experience this problem in the future. I know that there are numerous other posts on the issue, and Gus' excellent on www.jagrepair.com, but I'm thinking that the audio recordings, photos, and description of what I experienced might be nice to have in one place on the forum. I'll put a link here once I've got that done.

 

Congratulations Jeff! Thanks for sharing your fix.

John

 

On the road again!