Jeebus, it’s been a week since I updated. That hasn’t happened in awhile. Between all the stuff going on around New Year’s with Mike and Allison staying here, and working on my car, I haven’t used the computer much at all, except for work on Thursday and Friday.
I’ve got almost everything taken apart on my car that I have to remove to get access to the cylinder heads. Tomorrow I’ll actually take the heads off, clean them, and put them back on with new gaskets. Subaru’s engine design is really cool, except that having two separate heads on a 4-cylinder car really sucks, because I have to do twice the work to remove them.
I’ve already broken two (out of three) timing belt covers, but I can get replacements at a junkyard pretty cheaply. Both PCV pipes broke when I tried removing them from the valve covers, and those are probably dealer-only items, so I’ll pay through the nose. The nuts that hold the engine fan and fan clutch to the water pump pulley had been tightened so tightly that I couldn’t get any of them off, and I rounded a couple of them off completely while trying, so I’ll have to cut them off and replace the entire water pump pulley and fan assembly, which I can also get at a junkyard. I didn’t have a socket big enough to get the crankshaft pulley off, so I had to buy a Stanley 1/2″ drive ratchet and socket set at Wal-Mart. I would rather have gotten a Craftsman set, but Sears was already closed and I didn’t want to wait until Monday to get them.
I should be able to start putting everything back together tomorrow, but I have to order all new gaskets and a few other parts along the way, so it may take me a couple weeks to finish up. I swear, if I have any other major problems with the car after this, I’ll retire the damned thing to the back yard and get another one.