2001 Forester: All of the exhaust valve guides are moving.

[Nug]

My sister has an '01 Forester. It has been a never-ending money pit.

 

I don't know all of the details, but both the engine and transmission have been replaced. The replacement engine is used, with a theoretical 100k miles on it. It recently decided to start leaking coolant and oil externally from the head gaskets. A quote to replace the head gaskets and steering rack (leaking, and has play in it) was $4500. Yikes.

 

I told her to dump it in my yard. Yanked the motor, put it on a stand, removed heads, ordered up a pile of parts. OEM headgaskets, that metal breather plate on the back of the engine, a new balancer pulley bolt, belts hoses plugs gaskets head bolts valve stem seals blahblahblah. Anyway, the engine is nice and clean inside, nothing scary, so I check the heads for flatness (less than 0.0015, the thinnest feeler gauge I had), and planned on bolting them back on with no resurface. I planned at this point to replace the valve stem seals, when I run into an interesting and troublesome problem:

 

A few valve seals fell off. There was no guide there for them to be pressed on to. The guides have been moving away from the cam, toward the face of the valve. Every single exhaust guide is doing this, to varying degrees. None of the intakes has budged.

 

So, what has already taken too long (no power for a week due to Hurricane Irene), gets to wait even longer (the machine shops are all backed up because of a week without power, too). I imagine they'll ream out the valve guide bores and press in oversize guides.

 

Anyone else see this happen?

[GeneralDisorder]

Drive them back in and stake them. Doesn't seem like a big deal to repair to me.

 

GD

[ShawnW]

If they moved I would pull the valves out in order and keep them in order. Then have the machine shop replace the guides and inspect the valves for any damage. Very unlikely it did any damage. IF it moved toward the stem seal its not as big a deal as if it came toward the top of the valve at the combustion end.

 

[Nug]

They were definitely moving toward the combustion side...a few valve stem seals were just riding around on the valve stems because there was no guide to attach them to. Yes, some of them moved around an inch.

 

I thought briefly about knocking them back in place but 1. They were caked with combustion by-products and didn't wan't them to get mangled or seized or whatever before getting them all the way back to where they were originally, and 2. She's about fed up with this thing, and if it means throwing some extra money at it to keep it from fouling up again, then she's willing to do it.

 

The heads just went to a shop that built a 1200 HP twin turbo LS7 for my friend's Corvette. We're pretty sure they can figure out how to get some guides to stay put.

[Nug]

GD wins again.

 

They pressed one out to do some measuring. The interference fit went away. The guide bores are still within OEM spec though. Weird. There are no oversize guides available through their suppliers, so they will replace the one they removed with an OE diameter guide, press the remaining guides back to their original positions, then drill and tap a small hole under the spring seat to intersect with each guide, installing set screws to lock each guide in place. Then exhaust valve and seat refinishing, milling, fresh stem seals, and done.