I found a decent vid on YT from a gal named Faye Hadley, she showed the trick to getting to that "hidden" bolt on the hydro tensioner. Unfortunately for me someone had rounded off the points of the hex head so I was forced to drop the A/C compressor and remove the mounting bracket. Not fun to say the least although it worked out well because I found a seized compressor mounting bolt. I snapped the bolt off and was able to get everything off of the engine and get the mounting bracket fixed. My local Ace hardware came through again with good quality metric hardware, I was able to get flange head bolts for the tensioner in the same tensile grading as the OE bolts. The new bolts have a 13mm head where the OE bolts had a 10mm head. I honestly don't care !

There's not too many pics as there are well documented threads and YT Videos showing how to do a T-belt job. Today was productive, I got the cam and front crank seals installed, the front of the engine degreased and the new T-belt in place.


I found where some of the oil was leaking from! The VC gasket replacement should take care of the rest of the leaks.





I'm hoping to have it back to running by Wednesday, I'll get a few hours of wrenching after work during the week. It's about a 45 minute drive from work to get to where the truck is at, then an hour drive to get back home.

Not much more to report, I picked up the rad hoses and the oil cooler hoses from the dealership. Add 2 gallons of concentrate coolant and a new crank bolt and fork over $135. Ouch !!

I got the balancer reinstalled and torqued, that's all I got accomplished for physical work today. As I took this pic, I wondered for a second if I should have taken a bit more time to clean things up and make it look "newer". Aside from the grease being gone, it doesn't look like anything was done.



Here's the home made crank holder that has worked on a WJ Grand Cherokee 4.7 and now this 3.4. Not bad for a piece of scrap metal taken from a water jet job, eh?

Jiggle valve down is correct on the 5VZ... Though, non-OEM thermostat is a bad idea!

Good job getting to this maintenance before it was too late. (though, it is a non-interference motor, nothing really bad would have happened)

-Charlie

Thanks for the kind words. I was trying to be sarcastic about the jiggle valve, it's hard to get that to come through in text. I was happy that at least at one point the PO had the service done. I'm happy with knowing now what mileage and what parts were used this time around. ( plus it's documented if I should decide to sell it and go for the 2011 5th Gen that I've been eyeing up !)

Today I finished it up. I used a vacuum evacuator to get the last of the green coolant out of the system. I used the vacuum to draw in about 2 gallons.I ended up using about 2.5 gallons once I topped it off.

I drove it home tonight, everything seems ok. I'll go back to the shop tomorrow and drop it off and drive the Subaru home so that when I get there on Saturday morning to do the VC gaskets, I won't have to get burned on a hot engine.

It has begun ! The last big ticket item on the maintenance list. Valve cover gaskets.

Pretty straight forward in getting the VC's off, I took a few pics to help with reassembly but in all honesty, it would be hard to make a mistake. Everything can really only stretch and fit on one way.


Not too bad for 222K on the odo.


The VC's were caked over with dried/burned up oil. I used 1 gallon of "purple stuff" and a parts cleaning brush in a $3 plastic tub that I got from Target ( ghetto parts washing tank !)



After an hour and a half of scrubbing. The inside looks just as clean now.



I might get a can of red wrinkle paint and add some pimp factor to the engine!

Here it waits until Monday for the rear cam seals/plug things to show up at the dealership. Kind of a bummer to not be able to finish up today because of a little part.



Hopefully nothing crawls under the plastic wrap and sets up camp inside of the engine.

Hopefully this will end the oil leaks and I won't have my eyes burning from the oil hitting the exhaust anymore. Labor day weekend is quickly approaching, I'm giving serious consideration to burning some vacation time to overlap my companies holiday and driving to CO for a nice road trip.

I have too many things on the schedule for September to do the trip and I don't want to go in October.

This is it for maintenance. The next thing I'll do will be a proper OME suspension but that won't be until next spring at the earliest. A sleeping platform might happen very soon, I'm still not sold on the roof being strong enough to hold the Tepui RTT and my 250 lb carcass.

Yes I did !






I'm actually impressed for the finish from a $10 can of paint. I could see the texture starting to form after I left them in the sun for 20 minutes after the last coat. One can did both of them.

I'll see how they turned out tomorrow when I go back to the storage unit. It looks better than it did. I didn't have an oven to bake them at 200°.

All righty, lets get some updates. Why is it that the most seemingly "simple" jobs end up kicking our asses the most?

After spending time making sure that the tension clamp for the fuel line didn't bounce down the intake plenum, ( it was taped prior to trying to install the lower manifold section. I forgot about the fuel line so the manifold came off for a "quick" hose connection. It went sideways on me...)

I moved forward with the re-assembly. After dropping the only 10mm socket that I had with me somewhere into the truck, it took time to find the darn thing. I learned that I installed the driver side rear cam plug in backwards after I removed the passenger side a few days later.

Today while trying to finish up, I found out that it's kinda easy to put the rear TB coolant line onto the vacuum port, then I got the plug wires out of order when I installed the new ones. Hours were spent trying to find a readable wiring diagram before I found one that had the routing color coded. That's when I realized that the truck wasn't starting because of another issue that wasn't ignition related.

A buddy came over to see how I was doing and noticed that stray rubber hose not connected (the big vac line that is next to the coolant line.) Once I realized that I had been trying to pull coolant through the TB instead of AIR, I got those 2 hoses connected correctly then turned the key.

The smoke show was impressive!! I thought for sure that I had blown a head gasket, but after a few hard runs through the industrial park and across the open field behind the buildings, the smoke cleared up. I think I'll be ok, but I need to keep an eye on the coolant level.

Here's what I ended up with, not as cheesy as I thought it might look. I'll be happy if the oil leaks are fixed!

Sundays little adventure.

I wanted to freshen up the roof rails, they were rusty and rough looking.

I unbolted the rack from the roof, took everything apart and hit the side rails and the smaller cross rails with some of the red-/brown scratch pads, then cleaned it with isopropyl alcohol ( no residue after it dries), a few light coats of SEM self etching primer then a few light coats of Crustolium black satin.

It's not perfect but a million times better then it was. I reassembled it today and got it back on the roof. Like everything else on this truck- it's good enough for what it is.

man if that area behind your timing belt cover looked like that.....I can not imagine how bad mine is going to be lol It almost makes me not want to do it. Good job getting the work done!

You'll be ok! A big pump bottle of degreaser is your new best friend!

Thanks for the kind words.

Time for an update and a new problem.

On Friday I usually drive the 'runner to work, so as I was flooring it to get up to speed onto the interstate, she felt sluggish and there was a strange vibration. Then the CEL ( AKA 'money light') started flashing repeatably, it did this a few times. I get off of the interstate, limp the runner back home and take the Subie to work.

After work I go home I open the hood and check the oil to see if it's contaminated or not. No water mixed in, but the reservoir was empty. No water mixed into the trans fluid, so I take the truck to NAPA to get the code(s) read. P0306 is what I got. After reading so many threads in here and Yotatech, I'm thinking that I've got a blown a head gasket but I needed to be sure before deciding the next step.

I get a leak detector test kit from NAPA. After doing the test twice, I'm feeling pretty good that there's no internal head gasket failure, the fluid never turned neon green.



I pulled #6 plug and found this- I'm not seeing signs of major amounts of coolant being burned up. This has about 10K miles on it.


So now I'm stumped a bit. The coolant is going somewhere, slowly. My next best guess is the IAC valve gasket, I'll order one of those on Monday morning.

What else am I over looking? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Misfire on cylinder 6 plugs can go bad as I just a few weeks ago had a misfire on cylinder 4. How many miles on your plugs?

Mostly if your buring antifreeze you have white smoke coming out the exhaust that just lingers.

Quite possible a small seep somewhere causing you to loose coolant. Not seeing any antifreeze in your transmission and oilis always a good thing.

Sent from my SM-J337V using Tapatalk

Plugs have about 10K on them, wires are new when I did the TB service in August. I'm ruling out a faulty coil because I would think that I'd also have a misfire code for cylinder #3 since the coil feeds both cylinders.

I did a cooling system pressure test after I finished the T-belt service, I'll do another one this weekend. I'll also check the fuel rail for static pressure to see if there's a leaky injector. It's possible that the slowly disappearing coolant and the random misfire are 2 separate problems.

I wanted to focus on getting this rig ready for a Colorado road trip this June, I plan on taking 3 weeks of saved vacation and just enjoying a long trip. I need to at least figure out what's going on so I can make decisions on how to fix / if it's worth fixing anymore because I need to start doing some shake down runs with this truck if I'm going to take it on a 5000 mile road trip in a few months.

It started with removing a rotted out muffler then found this mess. I knew there was some perforation along the lower edge of the frame rail, but as of 2 months ago it hadn't gotten into the lower control arm mount.





Now it's time to decide if I want to deal with this anymore. I love the 'runner and I just got a new 5x10 utility trailer to help with chores in my new( to me) house, so buying a new vehicle is out of the question.

I've seen that safe-T-cap is now selling repair pieces for our frames, maybe that's an option. I'm sure that this is repairable enough to squeeze a few more years of life out of the old rig, I know that I don't have the right welding equipment to deal with that thickness of metal.

I'll update once I figure out what to do.

I'm more or less at the same place you are with my 3rd gen and I'm in Baltimore. One of my rear shocks snapped in half and I have an OME setup waiting for it. I don't have a garage or great place to deal with switching everything off. I'd like to do it all right, with a diff drop, and panhard geometry correction too.

I also have a little bit of perforation on the inside passenger frame rail of the trailing arm mount and am considering having it patched with the Safe-T-Cap stuff. I had a shop look at mine a while ago, near BWI, that appears to do some custom off-road builds. Their shop looked pretty clean and had some cool fab projects going on. Shop is called Wits End Fabrication. I have not used them for anything more than an oil change yet but they appear to be the type of shop I'd want to do a frame job. Their quote wasn't cheap but seemed pretty reasonable. I know it's a lot of work.

Do you want to be the guinea pig or me? lol