EA81T Leaks (Oil, Water)

[555jay]

Background: I bought a turbo BRAT last year with a blown-out headgasket. Long term plans are to rebuild/refresh that motor, but in the meantime, I found and installed another EA81T with good compression in it's place.

 

This weekend I put in oil and coolant and turned it over several times, and found out I have several leaks. At the very least, the oil stayed clean and the coolant stayed green, so I'm going to address the leaks individually and see how that works out. Please lend advice to anything I'm missing.

 

1. Oil leak at the extra fittings on the factory sandwich adapter. I could not see where the oil was seeping, but it was running down past the oil-thermostat and dripping off the banjo bolt heads for the oil cooler lines. (Dripping on to the exhaust header! ) My best guess is that the top line, oil feed to the turbo, is leaking and I'll swap in some new copper washers, but is the sandwich plate itself ever a problem for leaking? And is the oil-thermostat supposed to have a washer, because I don't see one in the manual, and my other motor didn't have one.

 

2. Coolant leak at the fitting at the bottom front of the RH head, which goes back under the head and up to the turbo. I can't clearly tell if the leak is at the bolt or in the line as it joins to its ring-end. I suspect this line may have taken load-bearing stress when this motor was stored, as the cross-pipe of the header had also come loose as a result of the tie-down pressure. Again, I'll probably refresh the copper washers first, to avoid swapping out the pipe and dealing with the bracket bolt behind the up-pipe.

 

3. Other coolant dripping from crossmember. These are slow, but steady. I can not pinpoint a source on either side, but I suspect headgaskets. Since compression is good and coolant is clean, I wonder if it's okay to use radiator stop-leak with these motor/gaskets for external leaks. I had the same issue on my SOHC EJ25, and the stop leak fixed it right up,

 

Let me know if I'm missing anything obvious. Thanks for all the help!

[MilesFox]

I would suspect another coolant hose there would w a water pipe that runs under the engine to a rubber hose behind the head under the turbo.

 

Replace any and all hoses for reliability.