silvarick

Any chance you could elaborate on the "flat rate shorcuts"? They did tear down the engine after I spoke to them and found the right exhaust cam was the one that seized. It doesn't look like it damaged the pistons so they are saying that they could install a used cylinder head but that it would be a "crap shoot", that there could be other problems that aren't visible. I'm just trying to get as much info as possible to argue the point as you said "they removed the the very part that seized". But having gone over 2K miles since the work was done could anything they did take that long to show up.

The last oil change was the one they did when the head gasket was replaced. There were no oil leaks, no smoke, no noises, can't be sure how often oil level was checked as my son was using the car. They claim that the "SAE" standard is that an engine with over a 100K miles will burn a qt. per 1K miles on average. So they claim having driven 2500 miles it could have used between 2.5 to 3 qts of oil. When I checked it after we had it towed to the dealer it was down about 1.5 qts. They say that the cams being the furthest out would starve for oil first.

I recently had the head gasket replaced on a 1999 Outback with 112,000 miles on it. At the same time they did a complete engine re-seal. The car was only driven a little over 2500 miles during the next 4 months. The car stalled and we couldn't get it started and had it towed to the Subaru dealer that did the head gasket. They are now saying that the right intake cam has seized due to lack of oil (they claim it was very low) and when it seized it would have caused massive internal damage. They are recommending installing a used engine, that it's not worth opening up the existing engine to see the damage because it will cost more to repair than installing a used engine. Does this make sense? Could anything they did during the head gasket replacement have caused this 4 months later? After spending over $2,000.00 on a head gasket the idea of pouring 2-3 more thousand into a used engine is tough. Any thoughts?