HELP!! - Major oil leak! :-(

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HELP!! - Major oil leak! :-(

Postby Duck! » Sun Jul 02, 2017 10:35 pm

Hey all, been a while since I've been on here.

My venerable MY98 Outback has just quite suddenly developed a serious leak. It's dribbled a little bit for a while, but just now in the space of a few days it is seriously pissing out. From what I can tell, trying to slither under the car & in a position to not get showered in the stuff, the bulk of the leakage appears to be coming out of the timing belt cover, suggesting a front-of-engine leak. So, is this likely to be a symptom of the dreaded head gaskets, or something else? How difficult would it be to tackle at home? I have good mechanical aptitude and the appropriate Haynes service book which has served me well before. How readily available, and roughly how much would I be looking at for parts (I know this will be calculated guesswork at best without knowing exactly what's popped) - I'm on a horribly tight budget & can't afford to take it to someone. All advice appreciated.

EDIT: It's blowing coolant too. I guess that's a pretty sure indicator of the gaskets. :-(
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Re: HELP!! - Major oil leak! :-(

Postby Duck! » Sat Jul 08, 2017 7:57 pm

OK, so having a bit more of a poke around the coolant & oil seem to be leaking from different spots, so maybe it's not gaskets (or maybe it is, but only part of the story :bad: )

Coolant primarily seems to be coming from the water pump, which Haynes book indicates is a blown pump seal. So maybe that's not as bad as it could be. It's hard to tell, even with parts of the timing cover off, but it rather appears the oil, or at least some of it, is coming from around at least one of the camshafts (being MY98 it's the DOHC version of the EJ25). Any thought on fixability?
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Re: HELP!! - Major oil leak! :-(

Postby Lane » Sun Jul 09, 2017 7:18 am

Water pumps have a weep hole so that when the seal deteriorates the water that enters the bearing housing doesn't cause that bearing to fail so quickly.

It usually hits your belts and or fans and gets flung everywhere so is hard to trace at first.

Give the oily areas a quick degrease and hose it all off, take a drive and your leak points should be much more obvious.
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Re: HELP!! - Major oil leak! :-(

Postby Duck! » Mon Jul 10, 2017 11:24 pm

Yeah, got the coolant dripping from the weep hole, really obvious when the engine's not running. Annoying thing is I replaced the radiator only a week ago, because I knew that was leaking, only to discover it was only part of the problem. Or the arsehole of a thing decided to throw something else at me straight after fixing it.... :|

Although neither leak is a good thing, one small apparent positive is that the two fluids seem to be coming out clean, i.e. not mixed suggesting that maybe the head gaskets are OK after all. But something else is seriously not OK.... :cry:
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Re: HELP!! - Major oil leak! :-(

Postby Daniel33 » Sun Aug 06, 2017 2:05 pm

So, where was the oil coming from?
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Re: HELP!! - Major oil leak! :-(

Postby Duck! » Sun Aug 06, 2017 7:18 pm

At least one camshaft seal is leaking very badly, the other three cams and the crank seal look questionable, so I'm replacing all five front seals, plus the water pump. There's tomorrow's project.....
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Re: HELP!! - Major oil leak! :-(

Postby Daniel33 » Tue Aug 08, 2017 12:05 am

Ahh. OK. Good luck!!
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Re: HELP!! - Major oil leak! :-(

Postby Duck! » Thu Aug 10, 2017 7:50 pm

Gone from bad to shithouse.....

Dunno what the hell Subaru use to do the cam sprocket bolts up with, but they don't come undone. So camshaft seals are untouched. But in the process of a bit of other poking around & checking the retainer caps on the ends of the camshafts - which also seat the oil seals - I found a broken bolt on the one I suspected was the main leak. With inadequate tension clamping the seal, bingo, there's the leak. In an effort to at least get it to a temporarily functional state I smothered the thing in gasket sealant and proceeeded to put it back together, at which point the other bolt sheared off under minimal torque. Fuck. :x Although the valve cover interlocks over the retainer cap, it doesn't clamp down hard enough to form a seal, so now it's really pissing out. And I've now got two sheared-off bolt stubs in the left head to try to get out.....
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Re: HELP!! - Major oil leak! :-(

Postby Daniel33 » Sun Aug 13, 2017 8:53 pm

Sounds like it was not a good weekend for some!!

I have only got the single cam engines here, and have yet to get into replacing seals, but it sounds like a mission. I have seen and done before a cheat extraction process, but it is risky to do. If you can't get a pair of vice grips onto the end of the bolt, or any movement from an easy out, (as is often the case), welding a nut to the end of the bolt works exceedingly well....provided you can weld!!
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Re: HELP!! - Major oil leak! :-(

Postby Duck! » Sun Aug 13, 2017 11:29 pm

Real fun & games, but got the buggers in the end. Had to pull the head out to do it though..... Busted-off bits of bolt were well recessed into the head flange, so nowhere near being able to grab them with vice grips, and bugger-all space between the head & the body frame to get in & really work at them.

But to get the head off I had to remove the camshafts first, but to get the cams out, because of the ridiculously tightened sprocket bolts I kind of had to break a little bit of the back timing cover to get the front retainers out...... But once the cams were out it was easier to have a real go & get the sprockets off - with a bench vice and metre-long breaker bar! :shock:

Dropping the head was a bit fiddly, but not too bad, then it was simply a matter of drilling down the guts of the broken bolt stubs, whacking in an easy-out & unscrewing them. Getting the head back in was a little awkward - remembering that I'm doing this with the engine in the car - had to drop it in vertically, front-end down, then lift & rotate into position & get the bolts in. Should add the gasket looked OK, so just smothered it in gasket sealant & put it back in.

With the cam sprockets now removed, refitting them, with the new seals was a lot easier. Not sure what the single-cam heads are like, but on the twins the front shaft retainer doubles as part of the seal seat, so it's easy as to pop the new seal in then torque up the retainer bolts - and not break them this time.....

Still got a little bit of reassembly to do, mainly getting the exhaust header back on, and just a few little bits, but we'll see tomorrow if surgery was successful. Sure ly can't have got any worse than it was......
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Re: HELP!! - Major oil leak! :-(

Postby Duck! » Mon Aug 14, 2017 2:52 pm

And it seems to be fixed! :-D Hoo-bloody ray!!
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Re: HELP!! - Major oil leak! :-(

Postby jslayz » Mon Aug 14, 2017 10:42 pm

well done!!
Heck of a DIY
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My Lib Pics here: http://forum.liberty.asn.au/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=15523&start=570#p370656
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Re: HELP!! - Major oil leak! :-(

Postby Daniel33 » Mon Aug 14, 2017 11:40 pm

Did you say you re-used the head gaskets?? That's just asking for more trouble imo. Old copper ones could be softened and re-used, but not the modern types as far as I know.
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Re: HELP!! - Major oil leak! :-(

Postby Duck! » Fri Aug 18, 2017 10:39 pm

Le sigh.... Got a weird rough patch between about 1800 & 2600rpm, and a little lumpy at idle, but gets OK from around 2500 & up. I'm hoping I might have just got one of the cams a notch out of whack putting the belt back on; it was getting late in the day & a bit short of light when I did it, and not easy to see some of the guide marks.

And it popped another radiator, so there was another fix I had to do.

But the fluids are staying in where they're supposed to, and I can't smell anything weird, for a change. :-)

EDIT: Redid the timing belt today to make sure all the marks were properly lined up. Too hard to try to get the belt to do the right number of laps to line its guide marks with the crank & cam alignment marks, so just took it off & did it from scratch. Running nice & smooth now!!! :-D (Well, as well as can be expected for a car that's done 440-odd thou!)
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Re: HELP!! - Major oil leak! :-(

Postby Duck! » Sat Dec 09, 2017 10:09 pm

Well just for a bit of a wrap, after a few hiccups I think I've finally almost got the bloody thing sorted - if a car that has 440 thou under its belt can be considered "sorted".....

Trying to do things on the cheap & reuse the old gasket from the first head-job worked for about 6 weeks, then it really shit itself, initially expressed by loss of coolant, then difficulty in starting as the coolant was going into at least one cylinder, causing hyper-compression, which stressed the starter motor, leading to it burning out.... So cue another left-bank decapitation (a lot easier the second time around!) to replace the gasket, and drop in a "new" (from a nearby wrecker, 'cos I'm trying to keep costs on the old beast in perspective) starter motor. While the head was off for the second time I figured I'd better have a closer look at the spark plugs. Well there's the explanation for the rough patch, they were well & truly fried. So in went a new set of plugs (the two on the right bank were a right pain in the arse, but if I had the ability to see into the future I could have held off on those for a short while......

With a new gasket under the left head and a working starter motor it went great..... for a week. Then the same shit; lost coolant and bad starting. Which can only mean one thing: the right bank, which to this point hadn't been touched, had blown its gasket too. :roll: So we go around again with the other side, but not before it fried the first replacement starter motor, so another trip the wrecker the grab another one......

So, two weeks later and aside from a little top-up as the air bubbles pumped through, the coolant has stayed full, oil is where it should be, it starts first time & fires consistently. Which seems almost normal. Except there's a rather prominent mechanical ticking noise from somewhere......
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