when my car idles the exhaust just makes a pop noise and when it does it the car shakes is this a misfire or something? what i did to it was when i bought it the car would burn blue smoke and i think blue is oil so i replaced all my plugs. then the car stopped the blue smoke and now its doing it again, all i did was let it idle a few times being the car isnt road ready yet. so i buy new plug wires and i replaced my old ones to try that so now it finally stopped the blue smoke but now the exhaust pops and car shakes. it recently had a straight pipe on it but i put a new catalytic converter on.

any ideas on why this is happening?

 

Yep - that's a misfire.

If you replaced the plug wires, you might have gotten the firing order off - so double check the firing order.

Also, new plug wires are often bad. Take a volt/ohm meter, and with one wire at a time, unplug the wire from dist and from plug - set meter to ohms, and check continuity - the meter will be at 1 and should go very close to zero when the leads are connected to each end of the plug wire. Check all 8.

If all that is good, make double sure that each plug wire is securely "snapped" onto each plug and each dist terminal. Sometimes a plug wire needs crimped a tad so that it securely stays on the plug or dist terminal.

Then, as you were asking about, check that timing.

Could also double check gap on the plugs to make sure it's right.

But yeah, sounds like a misfire - usually they are caused by an ignition issue.

 

the plugs i bought they told me were pre gapped and i think its the plug wires because they all kept sliding off the distributor.