2.4T Motor Rebuild Begins

I’ve begun the process of getting the motor torn down for the rebuild.  

I started with this and began tearing it down.  The motor came from a 2005 PT Cruiser that was at the junkyard.  I was a little wary because the car didn’t have any crash damage, but we pulled it anyway with the plan to do a rebuild on it.  Looking at the oil and the cams, everything seemed okay — no water in the oil and the lobes looked pretty smooth.  Because of the bedplate design, there wasn’t a good way to pull a main cap to look at the bearings.

Once the lump was out, the first clue was that the crank pulley bolt was missing.  There was a timing belt and the engine turned by hand with no apparent difficulty.

Looking in to the head, there is a lot of carbon on the tops of the valves.  And once the head was off, the carbon was just flaked all over the pistons:

I think this is due to bad valve seals letting oil in.  The charge pipes were completely dry and free of oil, so I think the turbo seals are good.  There’s still good cross-hatch on the cylinder walls and everything moves smoothly.

The crank pulley is a little bit of a challenge.  Autozone rents a tool that is for Chryslers, but it needs a little help:

The two rods that come with it that go into the crank bolt hole are not long enough on their own and are too long when used together (plus it wouldn’t be stable).  The key is to put a small screwdriver bit down into the puller bolt to give it an extra 3/4″.  You also can use it “backwards”, but in order to get the jaws in, you have to pull the pin, put the jaw in, put the puller over the jaw, and replace the pin.  Once you do that, it comes right off.

Once that pulley was off, I removed the lower timing cover and found why I think the car was in the junkyard:

That bolt was dropped in later, but notice that the timing belt is missing a ton of teeth.  Good thing the 2.4 is a non-interference engine!