Look at the Ford Mustang. It's suffered designer bloat and resized down several times.

Gasoline is bad for that besides the fire hazard because it evaporates so fast.

Yeah, but since the lobes are all synchronized according to the firing order, they'd all have a similar low compression reading no matter how you timed them. Since the exhaust would all be off by X amount and the intake would all be off by Y amount.

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I didn't work on one of those until 1996 or so... I'm a n00b.

I heat my house with electricity. And in environment discussion I'm therefore a bad guy. Everyone is bugging on people who heat with electricity. Not that much on people who heat with oil, f.i.

Why is it the opposite when talking about cars? Why are electric cars supposed to be better than petrochemical cars?

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. 90% going from a battery, but where's that battery energy come into play? You have to look at the "well to wheel" efficiencies which include everything from mining the resource and burning it to the final output of your car. I don't recall which one is in the lead right now, but with Nuclear energy, electricity will eventually win anyway.

As for the timing suggestion, the cams are in time with themselves for sure, and I checked and rechecked a thousand times back-in-the-day when I was assembling the engine because it's such a pain in the ass to do. It's still possible that it's off, but for it to be down to 40 psi would practically require it to be 90 degrees off. Moreover, the balance shafts are timed as well and they appear to be in working order because the engine doesn't shimmy like a beast when I turn the engine over. (If they were out-of-order, it could be as much as twice the unbalanced force as had the engine had no balance shafts at all.)

My only options that I can think of (assuming a good head) are a badly-seated or improperly torqued heat gasket or possibly a cracked block. The block could be cracked because before last winter I put coolant into it but didn't properly mix the anti-freeze and water before putting it in. I put about half a jug of water and then half a jug of coolant, and then I mixed the rest together and dumped it in. So winter could freeze some water and destroy my block, however, I don't think it's likely. I never filled it completely with coolant/water, so it had room to expand even if it wasn't mixed and no freeze plugs have exploded.

Either way, I don't really have time to work on it during the rest of my spring break. I've got to replace the timing chain guides on my VR6 which is a very time-intensive job. The dealer quoted me $1,200 just in labor.

Ditto. I didn't run a tap. However, that was two years ago. Now I work a tap like I do peanut butter across bread. If I had realized it was that easy, I would have done it.