amhawks

Any ideas (besides stacking) that causes them to break?

Whats the difference? I always just buy these from the parts store. . . no good? I thought they were pretty much just a little check valve.

No clue if they are stuck together or stacked until tonight. I will open the valve covers up and get a better peek at them. What the worst case scenario with not running these? How big of a pain was it to tear into this? My engines out, that's a plus! Glad to hear I'm not the only one!

1996 2.2 with 166K Changing timing belt and swapping engines around so I decided to re-seal the oil pan. In cleaning up the pan I found 3, thin, pieces of metal in a half circle (broken). Metal in a pan always throws up a flag so I started researching and asking questions. A Subaru buddy of mine thinks they are the spring washers in the rocker arms. I haven't had a change to pull the rocker arm covers and take a peak to verify. They are a clean break, no discoloration. Questions: 1. How did these break? (no discoloration) 2. On a scale of 1-10 (10 being ka-boom) how bad can this be? 3. Anyone ever seen this before? I own 2, 96 2.2's. I like them, just hate the valves (can't adjust the 96 valves - most anyways from 96). I'm not really wanting to dump much more into this particular engine as I was thinking of re-building/re-placing it in 40k or 4-5 years. I need reliability, but when it comes down to it I'm limited on funds (or cheap, depending on how you look at it). Thanks!