I replaced all my plugs today and noticed on 4-5 of them there was a fair bit of oil deposit on them. Does this mean the piston rings/gaskets whatever are trashed? And would it explain the hard time starting when the cars sat a few days?

 

Well first off, is it an old motor? Your rings probably are worn out which results in poor compression which makes for poor starting. Check your cylinders with a compression tester and those oily cylinders will probably have low compression.

 

Most likely it's the valve seals, like about 99% of all the other small block Chevy motors that burn a little bit of oil at startup. That has nothing particularly to do with being hard to start; that would probably be connected to the fuel evaporating or otherwise going away from where it can get into the motor after it has been sitting for a while. That would depend on what kind of motor it is (carb or FI)

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"So many Mustangs, so little time..."
ICON Motorsports

 

Its a carbed 1984 305. The car has a hard time starting when its sat for about 3 days. It takes three good cranks to even get it to start to catch. Then its another 2-3 cranks of starting and dieing before it will finally crank and start and idle like crap for a few minutes around 450-500 before it finally gets up to the 650 idle its suppost to be at.

And since I noticed oil on the spark plugs I would have thought that the oil was causeing the engine to have a hard time startng till it burnt off the oil or whatever. And the only thing I could think of that would put oil into the chamber was if the piston ring things were shot.

Theres 87k on the car so is this about the time they go bad or something?