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Showing results for tags '1986 Subaru Gl troubles'.
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I need some Subbie big brains help on this. I've got a straight, beeutiful interior, 4x4 1986 Subaru GL Wagon. I want to keep her. Everybody thinks I'm nuts ( well, maybe not everybody) OK. Some dirt mechanic was messing with her: her name's Lulu. He changed the water pump on her after she’d redlined. He got a little sloppy. The timing belts were squishy and I said I thought they needed to be changed ( which they did) but he couldn’t do it. See, I’ve lost my regular mechanic who used to keep track of things like that and I don’t work on cars anymore due to unfortunate physical issues. Well, all seemed fine until the engine seemed to blow up after I plugged the AC harness back together. Fried the new alternator I’d put on her, blew off two plug wires and a wire off the alternator and still made it home. Need to check the fuses Talk about ROCKING OUT!!!!! That engine looked like it was trying to climb out and run off. .. The dirt mechanic tried to diagnose by part and used up all my money THEN told me to take it her and have her diagnosed. I drove her as little as possible like that all summer,(due to financial embarrassment) then found out this guy hadn’t even gotten two sparkplugs in right, so, she was running for about 4 months on two cylinders! WITH the vacuum leak getting worse and worse. Anyway, it turned out all the shaking had destroyed the intake manifold gasket and she was getting coolant into her crankcase. Not good. Giant vacuum leak. So I took her and got that fixed and then brought her home and did an engine clean and changed the oil again. It looks clear of gunk now. Please bear with me. I then took her in to a hoity toity shop that SAYS they work on SUBARU… well, not THAT old…too greasy and too much thinking involved I guess, when they can’t just take a machine, clip it on, and it tells them how an internal combustion engine works. They tell me she’s leaking oil AND coolant at the headgasket and the oil pump ( very probable) oil pan, etc ( Not bearings tho) and has cylinder blow-by and is shot. The older guy said he’d looked for a used engine and couldn’t find one. So I called a place named “Reincarnation”; told them what the other place had said. They were nice and didn’t mock the old Subaru afflicted; said that as long as there isn’t internal damage in the engine they could seal her all back up. Well. Who knows about THAT? The overheating bothers me the most as far as that issue BUT! I have an intuition that the first shop didn’t do much of a job checking Lulu out and saw the coolant left over from the intake gasket failure and maybe assumed she was leaking there. No smoke of either color coming out the tailpipe; pretty good pickup or maybe I’m used to her running bad…she has some missing/hestiation esp when coming off the gas pedal, some dieseling when shut off, not bad, which I think is screwed up timing. The carb is OK, I’m told. My main question is: do you people think the engine is done for and I should have a rebuild put in? Or degrease the engine and take her to somebody, if I can even FIND anybody, who knows these engines (EA 82) and get them to really scope her out? PS: I love this car. Not into street racing anymore, never had issue with her perfromance before either. She's got a little over 200k on her odometer and way less on the block I had put in her in '05 So, what do you think?
