Author Topic: Barn, From Jets  (Read 7423 times)

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #50 on: November 04, 2018, 04:56:08 pm »
Coolant adventure continues, feel free to skip this ramble.

When I moved the car to sell the EG to Brian, I noticed that there was an oddly coolanty-looking drip underneath the car. On top of that, I'd noticed that the temp gauge seemed to drop a lot more than it used to when letting off the throttle after a merge onto the highway.

I wasn't sure what was going on. Was this just excess coolant that got spilled inside the subframe during the burp at Vex and was now finding its way out now that I parked on a steeper driveway? Was some seal loose now that it was cold? I popped the hood and checked the level.

The level was down a bit (just above the min line in the bottle), so I topped it up with a bit more coolant from my stash and rechecked all the hose clamps. The top rad hose clamp was snug but needed a little more tightening going into the water neck, but the neck was dry anyway.

The only other thing I can think of is, since RockAuto sent me a turbo rad, the rubber cap I had put over the turbo-water-feed nipple had gotten lame since I first installed it during the timing belt job.

I pulled it off (with some effort) and then put a new ziptie on it. When I tested it again later after a test drive, it was suctioned hard onto the radiator, so I think it's sealing properly now and maybe the ziptie holding the cap on just got old.

I'll have to find an alternative to zipties, though I've seen no indication that the cap is leaking at all - maybe it's letting in some air when it gets cold overnight, and the radiator shrinks more than the cap.

Since doing that, the temp gauge is rock solid, it never wavers below just under a half once warmed up. I'm not sure if I actually did anything, or if whatever demon is making this thing bypass has just decided to lie in wait for another, more inconvenient, time.

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #51 on: May 25, 2019, 11:30:06 am »
The problem in the last post was a badly-cut-to-fit upper rad hose. Don't cut your rad hoses at the end of a long day of wrenching by hand in the dark, and don't bleed your uckfaying car sitting on level ground.

Now for a driveline adventure!

I was just out and about in the rain, took a corner a little warm, and then I got a "slipping clutch" feeling, with a horrible road-speed-related clacking sound to boot.

The engine revs freely fine with the clutch in, the clutch seems to work, the gearbox seems to work. The car will stall if I go too slowly, especially when turning.

After being restarted at the light, the car felt like it was running a little rough in neutral with the clutch in, so not sure what's going on there. No obvious chunks of clutch are in the engine bay that I can see.

I have a dim memory of when the rear axle popped out on my 06 WRX during autocross (god I hate past-me's writing), but I was driving in the rain on studded winter tires. :o

I don't notice any leaking from the diff, but also it's raining. The drivers' side rear CV boot seems wet, but also it's raining.

Going to get under there when I have a chance and see if it is in fact loose. Maybe I can bang it back in with a chunk of wood.

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #52 on: September 27, 2019, 08:50:23 pm »
Hey, I finally got back to this car, because the winter is coming and I need something with snow tires again. Anyway, I'm still really mad at it.

When I got back to it, the battery was dead. No surprise after sitting for four months. Why didn't I work on the car when it was warm instead of snowing? I dunno.

After charging the battery, I gave it the first fire, to which it didn't want to start until I put it in flood clear mode. After that, it started, and then stalled after a bit.

Another start produced a loud clacking sound, but not as frequent as you'd expect from lifter or rod failure. I assumed, at this point, that I had a case of The Knocks. Then a glorious squeal came out of the engine bay.

I removed the AC belt, since installing a new tensioner was the last thing I uckfayed with, and started again. No difference, except now the clack was much louder and easier to place. It sounded like it was coming from the mid-front of the engine.

I recorded a quick cellphone video while wanting to die:


After looking through every "Subaru make weird noise help ok?" video on YouTube, I found this one:



I think this is the sound.

If that's the case, then the Gates timing belt tensioner I put on this thing has failed, just like it did for everyone else (I bled the itshay out of this thing, Gates sucks). I will pull the inspection cover sometime this weekend and hopefully I can get eyes on it without having to remove the crank pulley again (I mangled the crank keyway by putting the pulley on cockeyed during the initial timing belt job, necessitating a replacement crank pulley).

TL;DR:
  • Car still starts and runs;
  • Either a broken engine or a broken timing belt tensioner?
  • The exact same timing belt tensioner has been fingered in another video where it makes kind of the same sound;
  • Watch me delude myself into trying to pretend this isn't a dead engine.
  • Who wants to help me redo my timing belt in my driveway?

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #53 on: September 27, 2019, 09:33:31 pm »
If it's any encouragement, it should warm up next week and you'll have another chance at working on this in some decent weather. 
uckfay, Johnny with the back-handed slap. You're clearly the Oracle.

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #54 on: September 29, 2019, 09:10:48 pm »
I would be tempted to just to replace the tensioner but I'm lazy...

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #55 on: September 30, 2019, 07:12:43 am »
The plan is to just replace the tensioner, but I suspect it's probably skipped time since it's stalling and acting up. So a quick re-time won't kill me.

Plus, I need to remove all the front matter in order to get in there anyway.

I did not get a chance to yank the inspection cover this weekend for some reason.  ::)

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #56 on: October 14, 2019, 07:41:34 pm »
Yeah, I'm definitely another victim of a Gates timing belt tensioner. The sleeve that it rotates around is rusty and so is the actual roller on the tensioner. It looked like it had just decided to stop pivoting.

More pictures later, just really confused. Have to get a new OEM one and hope I can slam it in before the snow gets bad.

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #57 on: October 21, 2019, 01:55:47 pm »
1. Sorry for your loss.
2. Thank you for your sawaying comment ("another victim of a Gates timing belt tensioner") As I'm currently debating between a Gates blue belt kit for $466, Continental kit for 369, or the AISIN Kit for $318. The rest I'll leave to a coin now.
3. If you want a cheap-cheap fix, I'll be replacing my still-good tensioner and pullies becuase I'm weird like that. (Belt is oil soaked... cam seal is damaged... taking it all off anyways, ~50k since TB service - but don't know what was changed then so I'm just doing it all).
entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #58 on: October 21, 2019, 10:30:54 pm »
I got a new official Subaru tensioner from RockAuto for about $95 but I haven't put it in yet. The car is ready to go, I just need to work up the guts for the re-time job.

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #59 on: October 22, 2019, 02:24:13 am »
There are two different gates kits. The old part number now uses Chinese garbage, and they made a new number that has all the OEM parts that the old part number use to have. So you can still get the quality parts from the gates kit but they pulled a fast one with the part numbers.

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #60 on: October 22, 2019, 07:57:37 am »
There are two different gates kits. The old part number now uses Chinese garbage, and they made a new number that has all the OEM parts that the old part number use to have. So you can still get the quality parts from the gates kit but they pulled a fast one with the part numbers.

Yeah, I've been told that the Gates kit with "N" in the part number is NTK (NTN?) Japanese bearings.

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #61 on: October 22, 2019, 08:55:14 am »
That is correct iirc. The kit I bought for the forester was all superior Nippon parts. Just they didn't make it easy to figure out.

They really should have just made a new part number for the cheapo kits, not swap out the parts in the previous high quality kit part number. That was a greasy move on gates part.

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #62 on: October 25, 2019, 07:30:21 pm »
Even with the new tensioner in and the timing double- triple- quadruple-checked, things don't look good for ol' red:



I'm on the fence about what to do. It's sort of late in the season to start an engine-swap project.

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #63 on: October 25, 2019, 09:03:31 pm »
That sounds worse... Did you make it worse?
I may scream like a dainty lady, but I punch like a fairly strong 11-year-old.

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #64 on: October 25, 2019, 09:04:24 pm »
It's actually better, because now I can drive the car around without it stalling on turns or occasionally at lights. It was almost five teeth off on the passenger-side cam before.

As far as I can tell, the failure string looks something like this:

  • I did the timing belt replacement, and did not bleed the coolant adequately when I replaced the radiator so there was a huge bubble in the system;
  • In the spring, this resulted in an overheat condition after being fine all winter, because winter is cold, and also I parked it on an incredibly steep driveway immediately preceding the overheating;
  • The three times I overheated the engine (gauge jumped, smelled hot, but I shut it off immediately) before getting it towed probably screwed up something, because the car started to consume a whole lot of oil real fast after that;
  • Being fully aware of this fact, I did not check the oil as often as I should have;
  • Aggressively driving around a corner in the rain and accidentally leaving the car in second instead of upshifting to third during said corner, so that it bounced off the limiter for like 4-5 seconds, while the sump is virtually empty of oil, may have starved the rod bearings of oil;
  • When inspected, the timing belt tensioner was doing its best impression of a Mexican jumping bean and I had slipped a whole lot of timing on the passenger cam.

Maybe the bad timing was also a cause of the overheat, but I never noticed a significant difference in performance. I would assume I was like one tooth off at most following the timing belt job, since it 'felt' a little slower but it might have been in my head.

Even though Gates clearly screwed up too, I'm going to own the failure. It's my own fault.

Check your oil, kids.

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #65 on: November 05, 2019, 12:52:18 pm »
For some reason, I have decided to save this car and then run it into the ground.

There were a lot of options discussed:
  • Sell the car as it sits for like $800 and just go get something else - nixed because with the advent of winter everything leapt to $4000-5000 and for that margin I might as well stick with the devil I know;
  • Buy a parts car and swap the engine over - this one had a lot of appealing EJ251, EJ255, EJ22, and EJ251, options but none in the EJ253 range.
  • Stab a junkyard engine into it for like $300-400 - tempting but there seems to be currently a limited supply of engines at PnP (and other yards are more expensive). I might still go this way.
  • JDM 2.0L - Cam did it, it worked great for him, I'll probably go the same way. It feels like this will cost about $1000 plus supplies and a weekend.

Target is to start doing this near the end of the month, since we can't all get together until then. I think I will be renting a U-Haul trailer and towing it over there since both flatbeds available to me currently have broken cars on them (one Toyota, one Ford).

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #66 on: November 05, 2019, 04:08:41 pm »
I have a jdm 2.0 for sale that runs... Mostly.
It's just attached to a Forester ;D

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #67 on: November 05, 2019, 10:26:27 pm »
Would you work on this on the farm? 
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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #68 on: November 06, 2019, 07:28:29 am »
Most likely. Plan is to tow it out there and pull the guts out of it on either the 2- or 4-post lift.

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #69 on: November 28, 2019, 07:19:15 pm »


Got an engine. EJ203. It's crazy clean except you can tell the alternator and intake manifold heat shields have had a spray can rebuild.



In the garage it goes.

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #70 on: December 01, 2019, 09:29:37 am »
The 9-2X is now a two-litre beater (155,634 km).

Starting at around 11AM, we finished at around 2AM, including breaks for burritos and a 2 hour parts run in the middle. I think that puts me firmly in the camp of "enthusiastic amateur." I'll add some pictures to this post later.

I went through JDM Source, which was okay except the engine had clearly been dinged around a few times. The oil pan has a pretty good dent in the bottom, which is the largest of my complaints. Unfortunately, I only discovered this once we had put it into the car, so a future job will aim to fix that.

The resulting engine is kind of a mishmash of the intake manifold from my EJ253 and a bunch of other gubbins from this new EJ203. Basically, where something looked nice, I grabbed it.

Required work I had to do to convert the intake manifold:
  • The knock sensor isn't the same connector
  • The coolant temp sensor isn't the same connector, and it went into the opposite side of the water crossover pipe. Rather than extend the cable I grabbed the water crossover from my EJ253 and put it on the EJ203 - no problems.
  • The PCV on the EJ203 is a tube stuck into the block instead of the PCV valve stuck into the block - I ended up using the EJ203's PCV hose and then put a cap over the nipple that is supposed to go into the airbox.
  • I also swapped the oil cap over because the JDM one looked like crap. :P
Tearing the new motor down was fun. Did you know that bolts are supposed to be silver and not brown with rust? I kept yanking them out and staring at them in my hand, confused that there was a place in the world in which the things you care about aren't disintegrated by salt.

The clutch was pretty toast (probably because it taught the previous owner how to drive stick) and so I had to make a parts run to replace it and the flywheel, which I hadn't anticipated the expense or time of doing. It got done though, with the finest LUK clutch they had on the shelf at NAPA. I also did the valve cover gaskets while the engine was out, which was good since the spark plug ones were mashed and stiff.

Rather than use an engine hoist, we decided on the decidedly non-OSHA-approved method of suspending it from an electric forklift.

There's a few issues outstanding as you'd get with any swap:
  • The aforementioned oil pan concern
  • Power steering needs a bleed, since the system was opened to move some hoses under other hoses
  • Lower rad hose is still drippy, and needs new clamps and probably hose
  • Possibly related, but the temp gauge reads a little low even when the car is obviously up to temp and the heater is on "boot melting"
It revs so sweetly now. 8/10 would do again

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #71 on: December 02, 2019, 12:32:46 pm »
Bummer about the clutch, but WOO otherwise.
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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #72 on: December 04, 2019, 08:00:50 am »
Required work I had to do to convert the intake manifold:
  • The knock sensor isn't the same connector
  • The coolant temp sensor isn't the same connector, and it went into the opposite side of the water crossover pipe. Rather than extend the cable I grabbed the water crossover from my EJ253 and put it on the EJ203 - no problems.
  • The PCV on the EJ203 is a tube stuck into the block instead of the PCV valve stuck into the block - I ended up using the EJ203's PCV hose and then put a cap over the nipple that is supposed to go into the airbox.
  • I also swapped the oil cap over because the JDM one looked like crap. :P

Aside from the coolant sensor and your OCD on the oil cap, these are exactly the issues I experienced on my swap.
Good jerb!
Enjoy the lack of torque below 3k, but man doesn't it just purr?

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #73 on: December 04, 2019, 10:44:27 am »
I feel like Subaru meant for this car to have this engine all along and the 2.5 was the intern's project.

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Re: Barn, From Jets
« Reply #74 on: December 05, 2019, 09:01:02 pm »
I drove it around for a bit to really break it in today. The engine is much smoother and sweeter, and only got better as the learning process continued on the ECU. I'm having a bit of trouble adjusting to the new clutch, with its higher engagement point.

Time to make this new engine earn its keep.

Notes:
  • The brakes are a little noisy on the front right from disuse
  • Front end probably needs new sway bar endlinks, as it's wobblier than ever
  • Tow truck driver might have ripped the hole in my steering wheel leather wider, I should get a new outer rim piece from a WRX or something

Engine swap completed at 155,679 km. Also replaced: spark plugs, valve cover gaskets, oil and filter, coolant. Will probably need to do the timing belt on this new engine. Also need new oil pan and gasket.