New girl from Michigan with misfire

[gogocricket]

It did stick by me.. had some flat tires and it had to be towed away, but we just put air in them again and i was able to drive it home. Didn't even drive bad

[T0rque]

Wow.. You have had your share or trials with this car. Hope it comes out ok.

+1

[AmateurX]

that clarifies things, thanks.

You will all not believe this, but I haven't checked for the clicky yet, because I crashed my car. FML. Yeah, that happened. Currently, it is getting fixed. I hit some ice, over corrected, and then did some donuts across the highway, right into some brush, and effed the passenger side of my car up. I'm going to come out okay on it, but now I need to make the decision if I should just fix the bad side, or pay an extra $500 bucks to get a completely new paint job. New shiny paint all over would be nice... it is 10 years old, and has it's share of dings.

That's really sad. I hope you don't get discouraged. (I would.)

[ArkySTI88]

Okay now we REALLY need to throw her a party!

[xlaterdaysx]

I wish you the best of luck with your endeavors on your ride. I know what it's like getting knocked backed down once things start looking up. Cars are definitely a love/hate type of thing.

[Spiffy]

Just finished reading through 21 pages of this. It is one awesome story, i'l grant you that,. but holy ****!! i have never heard of such bad luck with a car!

k let me know if i missed something... *Buys subaru*, In the shop, out of the shop, into the dealership, out of the dealership, compression test, into the garage, out pops the engine, #4 piston kaput, engine rebuilt, car put back together, car wont start, car finally starts, car overheats three miles later, engine knocking, engine popped back out, leaky loose valves, valves replaced, ladder falls on car, engine hoist kisses car, car put back together, engine works!... turbo doesn't , car cold starts like a *****, oil pressure issue, oil pressure issue goes away (miraculously!~), tgv delete un-deleted, sporadic boost/possible faulty solenoid, iced over freeway.. donuts spectaculaaar.. trashed right side (health wise: lucky! came out unscathed. car wise,.. ), and to top it off, there is no tuner around for miles!

Well, you know what they say,. bad luck builds character.. or in your case, a car.

[AmateurX]

Update! Update!

[Abschatten]

Wow you've had quite a ride with this car, I wish you the best of luck with the car! Im down for throwing this women a party, I head up to Allendale Michigan all the time to visit my girlfriend at GVSU.

[gogocricket]

Just finished reading through 21 pages of this. It is one awesome story, i'l grant you that,. but holy ****!! i have never heard of such bad luck with a car!

k let me know if i missed something... *Buys subaru*, In the shop, out of the shop, into the dealership, out of the dealership, compression test, into the garage, out pops the engine, #4 piston kaput, engine rebuilt, car put back together, car wont start, car finally starts, car overheats three miles later, engine knocking, engine popped back out, leaky loose valves, valves replaced, ladder falls on car, engine hoist kisses car, car put back together, engine works!... turbo doesn't , car cold starts like a *****, oil pressure issue, oil pressure issue goes away (miraculously!~), tgv delete un-deleted, sporadic boost/possible faulty solenoid, iced over freeway.. donuts spectaculaaar.. trashed right side (health wise: lucky! came out unscathed. car wise,.. ), and to top it off, there is no tuner around for miles!

Well, you know what they say,. bad luck builds character.. or in your case, a car.

OMG. Reading your summary, I can't believe all of this crap happened with this car... but it did!

I got it back, repainted and beautiful, and just needed to take a breather for a moment away from the thing and pay attention to other areas of my life that I had neglected for several months during the course of this... epic battle....

Apart from the wheels, which I really dislike, it looks amazing. Really looks like new. I've put about 2500 miles on it since the rebuild and it's still going, so I think I must have done an okay job at least. It hasn't blown up yet I changed the oil last Friday and it looked pretty good, it still looked fairly clean, and I had ran it for about 1200 miles or so this time. Before I did the work, I noticed my oil would smell like gas a lot for some reason, and it didn't this time. I don't know if that's really significant to anything or not. I figure its better to have your oil not smell like gas though. So now I think I'll go to the regular 3000 mile changes.

I'm not quite out of the mess yet. I still need to replace that O2 sensor, and I think my waste gate solenoid needs replacing. Such small things to have left to fix, after fixing so many big things... I'm just a little sick of spending money on this so I haven't dealt with these yet, but I will soon. I also suspect my turbo may be on its way out. It just doesn't give a whole lot of boost. Maybe if I fix the solenoid things will improve. IDK. I have oil in my intercooler, and I've heard that is a sign of the turbo wearing out- anyone know? It was in there when I did the rebuild as well, so nothing new. I guess fixing the engine was more of a priority than the turbo. For now, at least I have a car that reliably gets me where I am going, even if it isn't as 'boosty' as I'd like it to be. And now the car is pretty and shiney as well

[gogocricket]

Allendale is really close to me actually... small world!

[mangostick]

oil in the intercooler/intake is normal.. but depends on how much oil and how long it took to get there. I had oil in my intercooler when I removed it to change my downpipe (2010 w 65k mi) I had to remove my intercooler again recently and there was some residue in there ( now at 74K mi) If you were able to pour half a pint out of there and it was only a few weeks.. yeah that's bad.. but if it was only some dribbles/residue and its been months/years of use then you're fine. Side play is much more a telling factor in how worn a turbo is. The shaft should have minimal side play if any at all.. if its wiggling around its time for a new snail or at very least a rebuild on the original one.

A turbo not coming up to speed could be a few things. You're barking up the right tree though, first I'd check that wga solenoid. If its stuck open and allowing the wga to see full manifold pressure you're only going to see 7-10psi max. Fun side effect of less boost is better gas mileage lol.. but you should be seeing 13-14psi if I remember correctly. There's also a restrictor pill in a vac line.. but which one and where you'll have to ask one of the guys with a older car. I'm not sure where they hid them in the earlier models. Either way what they do is limit the amount of boost the wga see's so it stays closed until a certain boost pressure. If that's missing you will have low boost.

[gogocricket]

Thanks! That is what I'm getting.. 7-10 PSI max. I am getting okay gas mileage.. about 23. I haven't really been on it hard since I'm not getting good boost anyway, it is winter, and I'm driving like a grandma now since I just crashed.

What's this you say about a restrictor pill? I don't know what that is. What does it look like, where would I find out more information about it for my 02?

I have some oil in my intercooler. I wouldn't say I'm 'pouring' it out. More like it dripped out after a while, and I had a little puddle, but not a lake or anything. Enough to make a mess. I feel like it might be hard to gauge what's normal without seeing one that is normal, and then comparing mine to that. It might be notable that I already had some oil in there after driving for less than 1000 miles after the rebuild. When I had the turbo off, the fan blades looked great and it had very, very little 'wiggle' from side to side.

[Mikie13]

Oil blow-by to the intercooler is pretty normal as Shawn says. Sounds like you have a normal amount to me, especially after going through a couple engines

Restricter pill helps control the boost. literally is like...a pill. Refer to this pic below. Shawn is also on point with the boost issues. Those are the right places to start. Manifold pressure of 7-10psi (usually closer to 7) would occur as he says if the wastegate actuator is stuck open. Pretty common thing to happen on the older TD04 turbos from what I've seen.

[mangostick]

Kinda but not quite.. if the waste gate ACTUATOR is stuck open you have no boost.. just suck (literally) .. because all of the exhaust that would spin the turbo is bypassing it. If the solenoid valve is stuck open that will give a "low" boost or wastegate actuator level boost. See the wga has a pre-set spring inside that opens right around 7psi or so.. it would do this if you connected it directly to the intake manifold.

Restricting the flow of intake pressure to the wga is how you achieve higher boost levels. Basically you're feeding less than opening pressure to the wga so it stays closed and keeps the exhaust flowing through the turbine vs escaping out before/around it.

Its kinda like those whistles we had as kids that had the little wizzy fan in them.. picture blowing through one of those until its literally sceaming then letting air escape out your nose vs through the whistle. That's pretty much how the turbine wheel/wastegate setup works.

[Mikie13]

Which is basically a safety in case the system effed up in some way or another...that's what I meant. My bad. Thanks for the correction