2000 SOHC, 3 speed auto. Been 100% stock it's whole life, which is 162K miles. Our family purchased it with 65K miles on it (i think?). During it's 100K miles with us, it had regular oil changes with Phillips Trop-Arctic synthetic blend. More recently it was getting Valvoline full synthetic, but probably only the last 10K miles. Plugs, wires and filters all changed as needed. The one thing we put off was the timing belt and water pump. It was never done.
Here is what we found during our complete tear down process:
The car
Starting in...
Water pump looked good itself. Suprisingly good. Wasn't noisy, spins smoothly, no obvious cavitation wear....
The block showed some slight corrosion damage around the water pump mating surface....not much, but more than I expected. You can't see it in the pics, too small.
The timing belt looked good at first gander, but then we saw this:
Remember, this is 160k+......so really not too shabby for OEM quality.
Pulled the head, main goal was to replace all valve seals. Other goals soon followed...
This is what the exhaust valves looked like. There is a mostly cleaned up one for comparison...
The valves and the valve seats on the intake side were fine, just a quick clean on the valves themselves and they were good to go. However, the valve seats on the exhaust side were awful. We cleaned the valves completely, and then lapped all the valves in. The combustion chambers are still pretty dirty, but all the big carbon buildup we cleaned off.
Before:
After:
The original valve seals were extremely hard....the rubber felt like metal. It had a little give left, but was very brittle. None of the original seals were visibly broken or damaged.
We also discovered that camshafts don't last forever. It looked good at first glance, but they we saw the exhaust lobe on cyl 1. Ouch! The roller on that lifter looks fine though.
The rest of the cam looked fine
Dropped the oil pan, and pulled the pistons to replace rod bearings and rings. The bearings looked good, cylinders looked good (still noticeable cross-hatch), but the pistons were pretty dirty, especially the oil ring. And lots of buildup on the domes. We also found one broken 2nd ring....we deduced that it must have been broken during engine assembly at the factory, and because it was just the second ring, nothing got done about it.
Pics of pistons coming, as well as anything I see worth snapping a shot of while we finish up and put it back together.
