We just took apart an engine that severely failed a compression and leakdown test and found some very interesting issues. This is how NOT to assemble a Subaru engine....

First, while pulling the engine out of the car we found this:



Someone had ground down the corner of the block so much that they exposed most of the threads. This is where the block gets bolted to the transmission... no good! This is sometimes done for larger stock location turbos, but should NEVER be done to this degree!


Then we pulled the heads off and found a ridiculous amount of RTV sealer in them:


This is after most of it had already fallen off. There was so much RTV that it had plugged up the oil passages the feed the cam journals... again not good!


The the oil pump came off and we found an even more ridiculous amount of RTV clogging up the pump:




Finally we pulled the oil pan and found a ton of bearing material sitting at the bottom:


This is what happens when bearing clearances are not measured and bearings get overheated from lack of oil flow.


And this is what we find sitting in the oil pickup:


That's a big chunk of excess RTV that made its way to the oil pan from the heads! The little metal chunk you see there was a little extra surprise. After looking around, we found that it was actually a chunk of the block casting that had broken off when one of the case bolts was over torqued!

This was a pretty interesting tear down and a very good lesson in exactly what not to do when assembling a Subaru.

-- Ed