
My girl likes the EA82 sedan body style - she likes the 4WD D/R..... and in part because I had an old '86 beater sedan that I picked up for $100 when we met years ago.
It seems that the 5 speed D/R sedans were mostly made in '85/'86 or something because most of the one's I've seen have been carbed, early models.
So I found her one about a year ago - swapped in a Weber. Figured I would do an EJ22 swap on it at some point. But I don't have the time or space or another vehicle ready for her to drive right now to do that.
The last few months it's developed a nasty lifter tick - so loud she got pulled over and the cop commented that it sounded very "bad" and was smoking (axle grease on the cat

Not wanting to spend a bunch of time and money I changed the oil and dumped in a bottle of Rislone and the ticking went away...... for about 500 miles. I repeated the proceedure with the same results - 500 miles it came back. This went on half a dozen times before I decided something more was going to be required..... hated to do it since the timing belts were done not long ago according the documentation so I didn't want to open it up..... but I didn't have much choice.
First thing I checked was the oil pump mickey seal - it was at that point that I realized that this had probably been an issue before I bought the car since the seal was new

So in utter disgust I figured I was going to have to go deeper. I pulled the cam towers and found the expected (for '86) rubber only tower o-rings that were hard, collapsed, and cracked. Picked up a new set of those. I pulled the lifters (which came right out due to the use of Rislone

At that point I figured there was no point in putting the mushy lifters back in since they weren't pumping up for me and the book says to replace them if that's the case.... I went to the junk yard and tore down an EA82 I found there with 112k on it - had a massive water pump failure. Pulled it's lifters and from the lot I got 3 that were pretty good and a couple more that were borderline (book says no more than 0.5mm of play).
From the 16 lifters I had on hand I picked the best 4 (all with pretty much no play) to go in the drivers side (because it's the hardest to get back apart) and the next best 4 to go in the passenger side. 3 of the passenger side units have about 1mm of play - but it's what I had and I needed the car on the road.
I ordered a new set of pressure relief valve springs from the dealer but they aren't in yet - the two for the banjo bolts in the cam towers and the one in the pump itself. For now I used the ones from the JY engine as they were about 0.5mm longer than the ones from my car.
Put it all back together - best set of lifters I could assemble, new cam tower o-rings, new oil pump mickey, ditched the belt covers, and sealed everything up good. And as I hoped the ticking is gone from the driver's side and there is only a very soft tapping from the passenger side.
Now I have an extra set of lifters to send to Mizpah for rebuilding. Note that I did dissasemble one and they are NOT dirty inside. They just won't pump up.
While we have been telling people for a long time to throw in some MMO or Rislone - I feel that in the majority of cases that I've seen this is really not going to solve the problem for more than a few hundred or a few thousand miles at most. I think ultimately that the seals play only a minor role in the equation and that it's wear in the lifters themselves that cause most of the problems. Replacing the lifters (along with new seals of course) seems to be the only long-term solution that really works.
GD
Edited by GeneralDisorder, 28 June 2010 - 07:02 PM.