While out wheeling my 87 22re the truck suddenly starting running awful, as if it were on 3 cylinders.

I limp the truck home and check a few things out, be performing a basic test of pulling plug wires while at idle I determined that the 3rd cylinder is not running.

I then replaced wires/cap/rotor to rule those out and toss in a new set of plugs even though the old ones looked great. Despite this the truck still is only running on 3 cylinders. The 3rd cylinder is sparking when you pull the wire off and it seems to be getting fuel as after pulling the new plug back out it was wet with fuel, and the top of the piston had some fuel on it. I also did a quick compression test which tested good

I am stumped!! The motor had about 5k on it since I rebuilt it, and the fuel injectors were rebuilt at that time by Rich at cruzinperformance

-Dustin

My trucks done this to me as well if Snow/water gets into the Coil or distributor cap. The heat from the engine however just evaported it after some driving.
By any chance, Once you hit a certain RPM does the cylinder start to work again? At idle, mine would shake BAD and sound pretty sweet, then at 1500-2000rpm the Cylinder would start to fire...then when going to stop..it would go back to the rough idle. After a few revs (upto 4500 or so) and maybe 5 minutes of driving, it went away.
Did any water at all come out of the distributor cap or anything odd like that?

Im guessing injector or bad spark plug.. motor only needs 3 things to run, spark, gas, and compression. Gotta be one of these. When my distributor gets wet, I spray the heck outta it with WD-40 and that works for me. Wet distributor is the most common cause of missfires, but sounds like you already checked this?

I've seen this happen when water gets into the cylinder (HG) - but you'd notice that you're losing water and have a bit of clearing smoke on start up.

Have you actually pulled the plug and watched it arc at the electrode? Try it just for grins...

Is the plug actually wet with fuel? Any way it could be something else?

PROBLEM SOLVED!!

To make this thread useful for anyone who happens upon a similar problem I will give a quick run down of what I did to fix my problem.

I replaced the cap/rotor/wires and plugs with genuine toyota parts and NGK spark plugs only to fine that I still had just 3 cylinders. I removed all the plugs to check compression again and did not find any problems. I finally decided that it could not be an ignition problem and finally turned to the fuel system.

I jumped 12 volts to the 3rd fuel injector and could hear it spraying fuel, I also check to make sure it was getting a signal from the ECU, everything seemed fine, however I still decided to pull the fuel rail. This really only takes about 20 min to pull the upper plenum off, once off I removed the fuel rail and the 3rd injector.

What I found literally looked like a brown booger oozing out of the fuel injector, I removed the rest to the injectors and clean out those and the rail finding more of this crap in the rail. It seems I either got a bad tank of gas, or some exsisting crap in the tank finally made it through the fuel filter. Using some carb cleaner I rinsed out the injectors and the truck is running well!!

I plan to change the fuel filter again and have the injectors sent out and clean again as they still may not be working perfectly