jeffseymour

Just to wrap this up: added a can of RESTORE engine restorer to top up the oil. Meanwhile I accidentally left the dome light on, the battery died, and the CEL cleared. Car ran great for short and medium-length test drives (no CEL, no loss of power) after I jumped it, and it looked like it was going to get us home. Loaded it up fully today to start out, and on a long (like 2 miles), steep hill, the CEL started flashing and the car began to lose power. There was no good place to pull over, and by the time we got to the top of the hill and I could get onto the shoulder, things were pretty cooked. Smoke in the engine compartment (and blowing into the cabin). Came from the catalytic converter, which had a big old scorch mark on top. Turned the car off, waited a few minutes, started it up, smoke again. At that point, I figured it wasn't going to make it the next 715 miles home. It's now sitting in a field, waiting to be sold. :-( Maaaaaybe I'll look into repairs, but at this point I doubt it's going to be worth it. Either the cat itself is melted (plus the cylinder problem still needs to be fixed), or the engine spewed so much of something onto the cat that something big must've blown. Maybe both. I'm kicking myself for not fixing this before I left home, because I loved this car. So the question I asked at the beginning is, for me anyway, definitively answered: no, not safe to drive long distance. Hope that saves someone else some pain in the future.

Update here: Didn't have time to pull the fuel injectors before we left (now kicking myself over that). Car ran fine for the first few hundred miles---CEL cleared itself. Then about a hundred miles later, CEL came back on and stayed solid for the rest of the trip until we hit the mountains in upstate NY. Got flashing CEL going up real steep hills when the engine was under a heavy load there, and was able to mitigate the problem by getting a good run on the hills, giving it plenty of extra gas, and revving the engine high (CEL wouldn't flash if I could do all those things). So the car got me out, and now I just have to get home again. We burned a quart of oil coming out (about 750 miles), and the mechanic I took the car to in January mentioned compression was a little low on cylinder 2 back then. So between those things I'm thinking it's probably a compression issue (bad rings, cylinder wall, something like that). Going to try to put together a magic cocktail of additives that will get us home, then look into a replacement engine once we're there. Anybody had a good experience with a particular additive or mixture of them as far as restoring compression on a bad cylinder?

Thanks again for the help. I'll look into the fuel injector along with valve lash, possibly this weekend. Anything I should look for in particular when I pull it?

Plugs we changed about 5k miles ago, so we know it's not them, and they were clean when we pulled them, so I don't think it's a plug issue. The mechanic tried swapping out wires and distributor coil while trying to diagnose and said the problem persisted even with replacement parts swapped in. I checked resistance on wires too, and they came up fine. Will look into the valve lash. If it's not a burned valve (because it definitely comes and goes---right now it's running fine, no CEL), any other ideas?

*Edit: For posterity, my verdict is no, not safe to drive long distance. Car died 5 miles into the return trip. RIP. Wish I'd gotten the engine fixed or replaced before I burned my catalytic converter up. Hi all, I've been lurking on this forum for years, getting advice on various little issues with my car, so first off: thanks. I've got a 1997 Subaru Legacy L, 2.2L, manual transmission. Car has 219k miles, and it has a rebuilt engine with (I think) around 110k on it that was dropped into the car about 40-50k miles ago. My numbers here are fuzzy because I bought the car after the rebuilt engine was put in. For the most part, it runs like a charm, but a couple of years ago it started throwing intermittent P0302 misfire codes. Every once in awhile (usually climbing a hill, but not always), the CEL will flash, and the engine will lose some power. Usually downshifting and revving the engine high causes the CEL to stop blinking and the power to return, but not always. When this happens, the car will sometimes run real, real rough (shaking like someone's outside pushing on it) and flash the CEL at idle, but then run fine at higher RPMs. It always fixes itself eventually, clears the CEL on its own after I drive it far enough, and then runs without problems for a while. Based on this thread and the advice of a mechanic, I think it's probably a burned exhaust valve. But fixing one of those is a little outside my expertise (not to mention tool set), and it's a pretty expensive repair for something that might not fix the problem, so I've resolved to just drive it until it either dies or the problem becomes more pronounced. It is getting more frequent---it was probably six months between the first time it threw the CEL and the second, but now it's more like a once a month kind of deal. I'm not worried about it driving around town, but I've got two cross-country trips planned for the summer, and I don't want to get stranded in the middle of nowhere at the mercy of some mechanic who's got no reason not to rip me off. It's my only car, so I can't just take another. So I'm wondering---is this a problem that's likely to keep getting worse slowly over time, or is it the kind of thing where one of these days it's just going to die on me? Thanks.