YASC : Yet another Subie Conversion, She's off and, uh, stalled... Options

[jsteele22]

Two weeks ago I drove up to Denver to look at an engine. An EJ25 SOHC in a wrecked 2000 Legacy w/ 70k miles. Listed as a "parts engine" b/c the front end was smushed and the T-belt broken. Price was $400. Not fantastic, but pretty good, IMHO.

(I paid $500 + $300 shipping for a DOHC EJ25 with only 30k mi last fall, but that turned out to be an EBay scam. I ended up getting $175 back through Ebay.)

Anyway, when I looked at the engine, I bumped my head on the hood. The wheels were off the car, and the hood rumpled in some, so it wasn't where it was "supposed" to be. I checked out a few other engines, then asked to look at this one again. Once again, I bashed my head, only this time I caught a sharp edge. Man, head wounds do some serious bleeding ! This one was a pumper. Didn't get a drop of blood on me, but everything a few feet in front of me got squirted. Righteous, as Hammer would have said.

Fast forward a week. I bought a pair of SOHC heads w/ low miles off Ebay for $150. Scored a batch of goodies (Water pump, t-belt, tensioner, gasket set) for $185 off NASIOC. So obviously, I've cast the die. Borrowed a friends truck, drove up to Denver, and picked up the engine. Got back to the Springs, and went straight to the tool store to pick up an engine stand. I ask the guy if there's one of the cheapest ones set up on display somewhere. Not real clear what he replied. Then I kind of remember the EMT asking me what kind of car i drive. Then the ER nurse is unhooking the EKG electrodes from my chest. Holy Crap ! No, it wasn't a heart attack. Some kind of seizure, but I won't know how/why it happened for at least a month and a half, if at all. Right now, all I know is that after asking about the engine stand, my face went blank, I turned to jello, fell to the floor, started twitching, and turned sorta blue.

So, in its own peculiar way, the project has begun. I've got a builder engine and parts, I've picked out an engine stand. And doctors orders : no driving ! I'm still pretty swamped w/ my day job + consulting job, so I really won't be able to start work until April or so anyways. But I can still ruminate (kind of like barfing up grass, but not really) about what I'm gonna do :

* Replace "questionable" heads w/ good ones.
* Maybe/probably get cams reground by Delta.
* All new gaskets, timing belt, pump, tensioner
* Brew up my own MegaSquirt-II + EDIS system.
* All the other stuff that goes along with an engine swap !

All this should put me on track to have my teener torn apart and undriveable in time for summer. Stay tuned.

[jsteele22]

Well, I'm getting even farther behind at work, and and at job #2, so the official "start" of the swap is drifting ever closer to summer. But in the meantime I'm squeezing in little bits on the side.

Today I went to the boneyard and pulled an EDIS-4 ignition system from a '95 Escort. There's helpful page at the MegaSquirt site, somewhere, but in a nutshell :

* The "brain" is right behind the fuse box, and says EDIS-4 on it.
* The coil pack is bolted to the engine. Easy to spot, since it's got spark plug leads coming from it.
* The 36-1 timing wheel (36 teeth, one missing) is right behind the harmonic balancer (i.e., between it and the engine block). Have to break loose the 19mm nut on the crankshaft to get the balancer off. I confess, I borrowed a little trick from the MS site : to immobilize the crankshaft I filled one of the cylinders with a little gravel. Please, don't do this to a teener ! After that, the nut came off without too much persuasion. To get the balancer off of the crankshaft, I banged on it with a BFH. Down, then out, down, then out, and so on. Eventually it seesawed its way off. The timing wheel is a ring is pressed onto the balancer, a lot like the front sprockets on a bicycle, only smaller. I separated it from the balancer using a pickle fork and the afforementioned BFH. I think I got it off w/o bending it any; it looks flat enough to work, anyways, and doesn't really carry any load. At the time, I didn't realize that the timing wheel was only the outer ring; had I known that, I would have just used the pickle fork to get the balancer off faster.
* The VR sensor is mounted right where it needs to be to sense the timing wheel teeth and also be very inconvenient to remove. Pulling the harmonic balancer first helps. Reaching in from below seems to be easiest. The engine is transverse, so this means coming in from the passenger side wheel area. At the boneyard, the wheels are already off and the car up in the air, so that makes it a little easier.

With all the electrical parts, I cut off a healthy length of wire from the harness, and made sure all the connectors were in good shape. One of them (that connects to the coil pack) had both of it's keepers cracked off, so I grabbed one from another car.

Anyway, the total cost : $18, of which $12 was for the coil pack. Hmmm, for my Saab (1997 900SE), the coil pack was about $300, and if I wanted a to replace the computer, I'd have to trade a kidney or sumpn.

Speaking of body parts... I still have 2 weeks to go until my first available, ASAP neurologist appointment. But I did get a little card in the mail from the MRI folks. Apparently I have "Multi-focal Sinus Disease". After some sleuthing on the web, my preliminary translation is that I've got a head full o' snot. But in a mere half a month I'll have a licencsed professional tell me this. Other than that, it looks like there are no giant squid growing in my brain, no framing nails, etc. (Did anyone see that story about the dude w/ a framing nail shot up his nose ? He was getting headaches, and I think it was his Dentist who finally caught something odd at the fringe of an X-ray. It was like 4" long, and he had no idea it was there !!!)

Okay, back to the subject at hand.

My other plan for the day was to pull a 2WD manual tranmission form a '93 Subaru. The miles were a little on the high side (130k) but I figured there's still some life in it, and the price is right : $70. So I'm getting started, and only after about 3 bolts are out did I realize : this is an old-style (EA82 engine) Suby. (IMG:http://www.914world.com/bbs2/html/emoticons/headbang.gif) So I'll put off the tranny pull til I find a decent specimen. And I just might go w/ a 4WD; we'll see when the time comes.

Also, I did find a 1979 (?) 924 on my scouting trip last week, and I had planned on grabbing the drive shafts from it and using 924 inner CVs and 914 outers. But based on my reading this week, I think I'm gonna go with new VW type-II (bus) driveshafts, and sell my 914 shafts once I'm done with 'em. I don't know that I'll ever need to replace CVs if I start w/ new ones, but it's nice to know that I could. And for cheap.

Anyways, next up on my not-yet-started conversion, I think I might pull the cams out of the known-good heads I bought off EBay (they arrived, BTW: no scam this time). I plan to send them to Delta for a regrind. Word is the cost is about $200, and it just seems a shame not to do it while there just sitting there, all out in the open...