Thanks for the kind words folks!
Still have some catching up to do, enjoy another deluge of photos.
Gotta love that factory repair manual!
The crank pulley was very very stuck on, it is pretty rusty. I saw a picture of the official Subaru puller tool in the manual, so I fashioned one out of scrap. I had to heat it with a torch a few times, but it finally came off! The pulley is in very rough condition, the side where the belt was touching is very rusted (the belt held moisture against the pulley).
Once I finally had the pulley off, it was time to split the case. Nothing too exciting happened, I used small chunks of fuel line to hold the lifters in place, I should have taken a picture of that. The excitement began when I saw the distributor drive gear:
Before I saw this, I was starting to wonder if it was a good idea to go this deep into this engine, as parts have been very hard to find. Once I saw this timing gear, I knew I did the right thing, there's no way to fix that without tearing it ALL the way down. When I stripped the accessories off the engine, I did notice that there was no bolt holding the distributor in. This is what happens when you crank the engine over with a loose distributor!
Now the panic set in, where the hell would I find an EA61 distributor drive gear? I looked at it closely, then remembered I had a spare EA81 crank in the shop. I went and grabbed the distributor drive off of it, and this is what I found:
It's exactly the same. Except it's not destroyed. This feels like blind luck on my part, but I guess I should thank Subaru for using the same timing gear on every OHV engine!
More later.