Quote:
Originally Posted by Tcoat
The timing cover is the heart of the oil system on these engines. One bit of sealant breaking off can plug up the works. You may never even find it if it is shoved in a gallery someplace.
This guy explains it well.
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Yes the pump is inside the cover but it isn't open to the cover. It's all sealed off under all those plates as seen in the video and away from the edges of the cover where all the packing is. So no galleries would be directly exposed. The problem would come from the packing draining back into the pan and then clogging the pickup filter. But after playing with this packing I am not even the slightest bit convinced that excessive packing leads to material breaking away and falling into the engine. This crap is incredibly elastic. I pulled at some of the excess packing on my engine just to see if it was plausible and it doesn't just flake off. You really have to work at it to make it break off. Actually MRT has another video where he pulls at this stuff and although it breaks off you can see it takes some stretching. I've used various FIPGs in the past and this Threebond stuff is nuts. It doesn't get hard as a rock and brittle. My opinion is that early models had issues not from excess breaking off but from excess oozing into galleries. Not in the timing cover though because the packing is not even remotely close to any galeries. It's the 4 drains from the heads, the cam caps (which the recall instructions warn about) and the packing between the block halves that would block galeries. But my theory doesn't explain the failures after repacks. Maybe those failures come from packing being scrapped off during cleaning and then landing in the pan which would end up in the pickup filter. But it's hard to believe techs would be that careless.
But It's easy to visually inspect every gallery on this car with the exception of the crank. All the others you can look from one end to the other (after removing plugs). To check my crank I simply blew compressed air in there to see if anything came out. Nothing did. There was no packing in my drained oil, oil filter, pickup filter, pan, pump, galeries, OCV filters, cams, cam gears... nowhere. All I found was packing blocking 60% of one of the 4 drains leaving one of my heads. I'll just have to assume that was the cause of my failure. I've seen others report blockage of the 5th main where the halves are glued together but mine wasn't blocked there.
I suspect if Toyota/Subaru finds a pattern to these post-recall failures that they will issue some sort of revision to the documentation. It would be interesting to see what that revision is.