G'day all,

 

I've finally got my red targa brumby's engine to fire up - but it's only running on one side of the engine (driver's side to the US crew).

 

I've checked plugs and leads, swapped the working side to the non working side without any change, swapped a good set of leads in without change.  When I remove plugs 2 & 4 there's no change in it's operation.

 

Would I be correct in thinking that I need to play with the valve clearances? 

Cheers

Bennie

Intake gasket leak? Is the compression good in #2 and #4?  It could be a head gasket also.

Edited February 22, 201412 yr by Crazyeights

I don't have the gear to do a compression test until I can steal dad's unit.

 

The head gaskets and inlet manifold gaskets have all been replaced.

The downside to this engine is that when I got it the guy said "it just stopped dead on the side of the road one day" and had sat like that for 6 months - engine was full of water as a welch plug had let go.  I thought it was a head gasket.

The engine was pulled down to a short block, all the muck cleaned out and the surface rust removed with some sand paper.  Bores *looked* good after this, cylinder 1 was the worst with some tiny pitting at the top of the cylinder, but it's one of the working cylinders.  Hence my thought that I need to look at the valves on the non working side of the engine.

 

This engine could be a loss, but I want to look at every possibility before I come to that decision and decide on what to do after that.

Cheers

Bennie

Solid or hydro lifter engine?

 

Could be lifters full of sludge not pumping up.

Hydraulic lifter.

 

I backed off the rocker arms on the side in question until I could make a tiny tapping noise with the lifter arm on the valve stem.

Fired up beautifully - got a little bit of lifter tick (to be expected) but it runs and I'm very happy with that.  No smoke after the initial burn off of the oil we put in the cylinder - much much less than what came out when I first fired it up!

Now to replace the water pump, ball joints, engine and gearbox mounts, sort out why the interior fan, radio and thermo fans aren't working, replace rear diff seals, replace damaged front guard and clean the interior then it's off for a road worthy.  Can't wait for that day!

Thanks for the suggestions guys.  Hopefully this thread might help someone else out if they use the search function.

Cheers

Bennie

didn't think to tell us you had a hydro engine, sure ? Import only as a used donk or special car import according to Subaru Australia.

I had an API import with....guys, Bennie forgot to tell how he drained something like 14 litres of black buttermilk out of this long standing ? thing...when I had a welch plug go on my hydro, engine out and back in, oil change, had a miss and a tick for 10kms before the crap in the lifter worked its way out or evaporated.

Maybe I got that wrong then - I thought they were all hydro, the imports were solid lifters...

 

Yeah I didn't think the 14 litres of water and oil I drained out was important to the issue at hand: 

 

 

Still going:

 

 

 It had apparently sat for 6 months with this mix in the engine.  I thought it'd be a dead engine due to over heating and a severely blown head gasket - but it turned out to be a popped welch plug:  

 

 

And this is what I found once the heads were off:

 

 

Hmmm... yummy!

So it's taken me six months to get it from the clean up after finding the above on the engine stand to being on the floor ready to go in.  It then took me a week to get it back in and running - on all four pots

Cheers

Bennie

Oh yeah, the engine has been rebuilt at some stage too - the pistons are flat tops without any subaru factory marks that I'm used to seeing on EA82s.

Cheers

Bennie

the ea81 that came out of b3 are a bit like that on top - flat, zip markings but still got sube marks inside